You've all heard the music. Why didn't you dance?

My muscles are sore with life, and I keep wishing that evening were here and that it were warm, that it were clustered over with high-slung vines of stars, twisted chains of fire in the night.

You've all heard the music. Why didn't you dance?

I would hope that the kitchen window would gasp and tumble with the scented thrust of breezes from the gray skin of the bay. It would salt the fumbling children in the streets between shadow houses; it would salt the lips of chestnut women gliding from velvet-shaded cars; it would salt the opaque red wombs of the clouds hanging like pulsing, pregnant, somber lullabies, softly now, over the streets between shadow houses.

You've heard the music. Why don't you dance?

I breathe the chestnut women gilded in dresses the colour of cool moon eyes or hot moon blush on evenings when empty cobwebs whisper between wind chimes. I breathe children with fervent dreams scorching up their hurtling limbs. I breathe sweet and hurt and want and the gossamer shaded membrane draped across the earth and the dead sun and the stillness of the porch and upon the pale shoulders of frail music throbbing through the tattered screen door. This is what I have been and shall ever be.

You've heard the music. Why aren't you dancing?

Ha.
Sometimes I get mixed up in bittersweet desire, a longing that is so wondrous and beyond me that I lose track of who I am; it doesn't matter.

Oh to feel it in the waking moments, in the noontide and the after hours. I hope you're singing someone's song in warm bittersweet desire. Ha.

I hope you love someone. That'd be nice, I think. If not, I hope you find someone. That'd be grand, I think. Posh, what a romantic I have ever been. Ha.

I never intended to stay.

There's a hole in your head, and I am running out.

Run, red river, to the sea.

"And I remember your aspiration, dream to fit in..."

But I must wonder if it is worth the time.

What's got you weeping, or do you bother weeping? They are curious, have you seen them, or are you jigging and ambling and lisping still still still? Are you as raw as I? I had not thought death had undone so many.

A nice phrase, not mine, having lost the gentle foreplay of words, having replaced gentility with futility and a mumbling stumbling foolery, watching silent songs in mute rooms. A nice phrase, nada más, mis compañeros. Screw the lid on tight and screw the lips that might set loose the cannons of exposure.

I request a delivery, Señor Eternal. How about a light, a match made in heaven, reeking of phosphorous with its brief flare. Oh, but give it a long stem, Señor Eternal, for there is no sun, and I should appreciate the illumination.

"So sleep child, no one can touch you now, no one can hurt you now, not here. Anymore."

There is no light on mornings such as these, but the wind can deceive you as it rushes through the tube of cloud and earth--it seems almost warm. Yet, when you step back inside after muscling through it for half an hour, your skin is deadened and cold.

I wrote a good one last night. Typically, the protagonist (presumably male) is the victim when it comes to wronged affections. In this case, however, the central narrator is the one who wins, with little effort, the malleable heart of the lady, and enjoys the fruits of such a relationship. It is not a cruel usury, and the shallow desire of the interaction is not intended to harm. It is instead implied that this is simply the nature of the passion.

Thursday will be better.





www.livejournal.com/users/poetblood

YOU HAD ME THERE, FRIEND

I’ll stick that boy
In the red corn in the humid garden,
And when the cicadas croak in his ears,
I’ll feel the shrill pant of his fear
Stoke the corn to hot oppression.

This is my red corn,
Where I can feel the movement,
Where the harsh beat of crows
Rattles between my ears;
This is me drawing my blood into my eyes.

Put that boy in the humid garden
Stemmed over with red corn.
Here you are without knowledge, without the feeling.
Have you got the feeling?
The breath in the corn
Is galloping the crickets in my wrists,
Stoking their violins and stopping up their chests,
So that they play and die,
So that they shimmy and cry,
The blood in my eyes.

The melodic sinew of dry jaws
Has given you solace, I hope;
The cicadan hymn of bannered tongues
Slops over into the south field.
Tell me, friend, to the south field,
Is this where you go, is that where your
Sweet ash is sifting,
Through seven cringing circles of red corn
In this humid garden?
Is that your dirge I hear cracking in the throats
Of the locusts,
Or is that only the forked tonguing
Of their dry membranes,
Speaking one hand to this red ear
And one hand to that red ear,
Reaping a red harvest
In this humid garden
Under my bloody eyes?

Who is he?

He's the same as he's always been.

Who was he before?

How should I know?

Then how do you know he's the same?

He hasn't changed.

But you have no point of reference.

Why should that matter?

How can you tell if a song has a chorus if you don't know the verses?

You should just know how it flows.

To do that, I would have to live the song. I would have to inhabit the sockets between the notes and pray that no one discovered me humming through a life that wasn't mine.

If that's what you have to do...

That's not what I want to do. Why should I compact myself into the claustrophic existence of someone else?

Why should it matter what you want?

Don't I have a choice?

One would think.

If one were to think, one would inevitably come to no conclusion. The complete circularity of both logic and irrationalism inexorably steams you back into the starting gate.

Why do you think that we become so childish as we die?

We are being shunned into the current of someone else's song.

Why don't you sing your own tune?

Sometimes I lose my voice.

So what? Hum along if your chords are worn out. Or whistle.

Sometimes I want an orchestra.

We can't always be a symphony.

That's true. Sometimes I don't even think I am an off-key whimper.

Well, hell, that happens to everyone.

Yes, but suffering makes you want to be unique. It is such a purification, a burden, that you want acknowledgement of your sacrifices. If everyone has made those sacrifices, who's watching?

Is that what you want from your travails? Shall I snap your picture and stencil "Martyr" beneath your sour mug, so that you can staple it to the wall in pride?

I didn't mean that. I was generalizing a human truth.

I would not go so far as to term it universal.

If it's all the same to you, I'd like to rest for the coming struggles. I am beckoned towards unconsciousness.

How often do we talk like this?

Not much, anymore.

And you would pass it up for the stirring of latent subliminal yearnings?

Yes. I have guilt enough for the both of us.

Then goodnight.

Hey Jude,

It wounds to refrain. Wish I could still dance, but I do not remain as much.

Hey Jude,
Trippingly on the tongue, salting into the pianoed remnants of silently lipped cathedrals. Build me a temple so that I may fall down and worship slowly towards an unhurried, unimpassioned death.

Hey Jude,
Don't make it bad. Take a sad song and make it better.

But if the notes are already dead, bury them under your tongue and swallow them like plucked virgins' lies, silk silk. Lose the name of action.

Hey Jude.

Thanks to Stacey's penny, callbacks went magnificently last night. Superb.

"Say that again."
"Superb."

I picked up Tiger's ashes yesterday, stood for a few minutes in the choke of that stale waiting room; Fritz, Alaska, and Tiger all succumbed with that septic air shuffling and hacking out of their lungs. I sat her on the seat next to me in the car and spoke to her in the way I always did, and it got to me again.

Here is a song for all of you to download; I think that even those who do not normally enjoy my music will enjoy this song. Go to www.momentsingrace.com and click next to the flashing orange arrow. Enter some bogus e-mail and, when the new window pops up, download "Broken Promises."

This entry is dedicated to Bonnie, since it's the closest to her dream journal entry that she will ever get from me.

I slept as though the wind had rushed into my skull and broken the ice sculptures which wail there, as though the glittering towers had tumbled tragically into the swirling air, and I slept with ungentle dreams fermenting and sighing with stale shattered age.

When the blue clutch of dawn singed the stooping bare heads of the hills, I did not wake. I slept on in the strange hollow of ungentle dreams.

I am thrust into the sunlight with brute remembrances clinging like lank dew to my dry bones. But hell, I can forget these ungentle dreams.

I will forge on.

According to my mole inside the DR-OTFH (Denny's Restaurant - Open Twenty-Four Hours) Organization, the waitress with the gorgeous ass is married.

In my well-educated opinion, that is a shameless waste of gorgeous ass.

The "Three Musketeers" auditions are today, children. Pray for me.

School looms nigh. Thither go I.

Denny's had better get a replacement waitress. I'll be damned if I'm going to be satisfied with a mere glimpse of spectacular married ass for long. I will expect a ravishing, well-formed, single waitress upon my next arrival.

Stacey:

Now that you have become Denny's incarnate, can you hook me up with the waitress with the nice ass?

Sincerely,
Kyle

Will you open? Will you cast off your fear like a torn garment, a ratty shroud that screens off sensation; do it for me, if not for everyone else. Unburden yourself and collapse softly into us like a fountain's liquid curls folding in upon themselves.

Will you not open? Leave it be.

I can see the beauty in a fall. I can see the tremulous temerity in a tumble, when I shake to the rebellious marrow of me.

So I raise my fist in pedantic defiance toward the suckas who think they can take me! Ha!

KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!!!

To share: who looks? I hope you do, for my vanity is such that I wish for you to rise with my heliostic surges like violins of grass, and tremble when my throat quakes in grief, and harp when my eyes sag under the weight of heaven.

I am dishonest. I'd like to take off a few layers; my own complexities have borne me under like so much soiled wool. I do not like the hookweights that I have placed at my temples to dirge about in leaden arias, slumping short of the gilded ceiling, unable to surface and breathe in the angels swooping sistinically in molten arcs through the firmament.

I speak too much.

I feel too concocted, as though I have nailed down my bones without intention, and confined myself without knowledge. I wasn't always this way.

I think some of you know fragments. Some of you know the whole of it, and I have given you little of that painting of late, only a blurred smear of darker colors.

Can I be simple? I want to be.

Good luck with that.


Loneliness is an easy commodity to come by.