This Town

The people run this town,

The dusty roads and sweeping jacarandas.

I am a driver, now a passive observer

In the realm of my car, I am removed from the ebb and flow of daily life in this town

Even with the windows down.

We are now outside the jurisdiction of traffic laws

My car is governed by the power of the people walking on these twisted roads

They are judge, jury, and prosecutor

 I try to weave between them, terrified of a pedestrian straying suddenly

A few seconds spread thin is all that separates me and a life ruined forever

The man in the shitty corolla in front of me swerves 

There’s a generator strapped in the gaping hole of the open trunk

Secured by cords that bear alarming resemblance to shoelaces, 

I’m sure it will fall and detonate in the middle of the road. 

Sure of a great fiery explosion, consuming the towering trees and roadside shacks

But it doesn’t, and there is no explosion

There’s just us, the people, and the stain of the earth beneath us where the rains eroded the smooth pavement

There is no vehicular manslaughter at my hand, only this town 

Governed by the people and their earth. 

If this is the end

If this really is the end
And you won’t be coming home,
Then all of it is yours.
The years, the friends, the tears.
I can’t quite tell if I see you in everything I made this life of,
Or if I made this life of everything I could see you in.
But the point remains:
You are the golden thread braided through it all.
Promise me to take care of it, was what once ours.
In this moment I am too raw even for my craft.
I can’t find the beautiful metaphors or the stuff of Whitman.
But even this crumpled paper trembles, and it won’t contain this monster I will become.
The air is thick with what once was,
And what has slipped through the cracks.
It’s yours, all of it.

Another Life

Today, last year, it was all about us,

And today, this year, it isn’t.

We are not bearing the gifts you are waiting to receive, or giggling as we blow your balloons.

They think they’re so lucky finding you,

And they are. 

Anyone is lucky to have you,

But you were ours first.

For a time, I thought that would be infinite,

But the clock has struck midnight,

And the sun will be rising soon,

Shining on you in their embrace

The Heart’s Melody

I remember composing an album after a traumatic loss. I usually turn to my writing to touch the depths of despair, but this time I reached for the piano keys. My fingers stumbled over them, slow but steady, eventually finding a melody congruent to the tempo of my heart’s desires. It’s never been my favorite, but in times of loss we enact a chokehold on what has always been familiar.

Strings, my violin in particular, have my heart. The music flows out of my fingertips, every note and beat timed perfectly. It walks the line between artistic and mathematical expression, a quality I’ve come to love. I work magic with my rapid fire calculations, pouring the precision into every stroke of my bow. 

The lyrics are unapologetically vibrant, all rich with metaphor, experiments, mistakes, and borrowed references from the songwriters and artists who came before me. 

Songwriting, and creating such a complete union of art, math, skill, and language is the incomparable discovery of my life. My artwork is my beating heart.

The Zanzibar Hotel Excerpt

We’re lying in the hammocks,

The night air is thin but warm.

My drink pours all over my leg, leaving a sticky trail of sour juice.

We’re laughing until we’re not.

Drunken laughter grips my brain,

Possessing my entire body.

O glances over her drink, her body rocking the hammock.

The lights fill the underside of the palm tree’s fanning leaves as the sand.

The drink starts to taste like lust, concentrated desire,

Not necessarily for O,

Maybe for the bartender,

Maybe for anyone,

But still, a tenacious thirst for more than the drink in my hands.

Though the bartender continues to shake drinks back and forth,

And O continues to rock the hammock.

In the secret landscape of my infinite thoughts,

I am ravenous for passion,

To be whole in another person,

If even to be enveloped in wholeness,

To distract from my own lack thereof.

Time’s Sorrows

Five in the evening comes no easier than the hours before it,

Wandering around,

Treading on bare earth,

Searching for worms,

And waiting until we’re gone.

Life is long, my mother always said,

The days stretch into eternal swathes of time,

Silky moments that appear to resist slipping away.

I realized years ago that this burden was only for one of us,

A sacrifice of mine freely given.

You need me to watch you drift away,

And so I carry it on bare earth in hopes of softening its sharp edges.

But I do wish that out of sight didn’t mean out of mind.

Thoughts from the shower

The clockwork gears unraveling beneath my skin.

A labyrinth, a lifetime in the making, is burning.

The absence of your nearness has abandoned me.

I showered today for the first time since.

And I lie in the sheets, like my skin, that have been scrubbed clean.

And although the warmth is all mine, I can’t help but resent the emptiness of it all.

Just a few short hours ago, this skin carried the tales of days I didn’t think you would see me through.

The dust trapped in the sheets, the muddy scratches clawed into the once pristine linen, all shouting at the world that we are still suffering here.

I’m lying still, but the words I’m writing aren’t even my own anymore.

And although I lived through the shower myself and smeared the soap all over my naked body, I am still not clean.

Because replacing a soul, down to my very essence, the erasure of my presence, takes more than clean sheets.

The Bird and The Storm

The tears fall, and once again I don’t understand.

It’s like the skies prophesized, the unravelling is inevitable.

My love, my darling is like an exotic bird.

He flies free, quick, never looking back.

Loyal, steady, but fleeting,

Drinking the orchard’s sweet drips.

I am a hurricane,

The tempest itself,

Bitter and crackly.

The torrential downpour at the sticky end of summer.

The bird and the storm,

A destiny foretold love,

Turned tragedy.

On Outrunning Destiny

It appears that I am fated to become my father, to embody his bitter years of tragedy as my own. I remember the time before it, like a faded photograph that no longer reflects reality at present. 

In the pursuit of rejecting the stories we are to become, we all think we are special because are different. That we are different because are special. Yet, we all overlap in the descent to madness.

I love life, I really do. But in the promise of it all unravelling, lest we become the unhappy ending, I’d prefer no one bears witness to what I become. Condemned to my own solitude, I will be both a wild beast and a god 

Dostoyevsky’s contemplation, where we are the architects of our demise,knows nothing of outrunning destiny