I sat in a music club earlier this month for the first time in 16 months. I have a habit of keeping a notebook in my bag. Something about thumb to screen just doesn’t get pen to paper. This is what I wrote while listening to the music. The “good girls/bad girls” line references a poem my friend wrote recently.
I do not need to see you to hear you
It is when all I hear sounds like a love letter that I feel near you
Because I am near you, in our kind of way
Good girls go to heaven
Bad girls go everywhere
And I am here, in my kind of way
Here, where I fit in
Like an orange in a bowl
Like courage in the psychological make-up of the rebellious twin
The exiled son – he feels the wind,
It is words at the tip of his pen
And music in the unfrequented rooms of his mind
His thoughts less traveled by
I can strip your clothes and be years from your grasp
From memory’s faintest gasp
You are emotion where expression receives mail
Ivy grows up bricks on brick,
Like barnacles on a whale
Whereas pain may be the ocean’s deepest waters,
You wade through those spaces, craving darkness
All the while not knowing what it means
What gleams from its repetitive exclamations
We can find you praying
Not even the shaman 3 doors down can riddle why
Riddle me this – life:
In all its halts and in all its jaunts
We are unchanging rocks, hardly weathered by back and forth motion
I am frozen
As long as you look at me and only see me