If I’d lived my life by what others were thinkin’, the heart inside me would’ve died

I was just too stubborn to ever be governed by enforced insanity

Someone had to reach for the risin’ star, I guess it was up to me

"Up to Me" by Bob Dylan)

Thursday, February 19, 2009


Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Yellow Caution Lights

Sun’s golden last grasp
reflecting pink strips in icy pools and black angular ruts
a world lifted up in tattered shreds dangling on wet branches.

Following the ghost who knocks on corridors
Carrying red roses, regrets and pictures of youth’s motley parade
The string of steps day after day
Horns, bells, whistles
The clanging gang of days---the year
Hordes who hammer schemes
Into concrete towers
Floating nimbly
In morning mist
Beckoning.

To cancel all of our debts in one final toss
All of the silver
all of the pride
I reach out for his boney hand
But he flees…

Only melody lingers
Only fingers fretting this guitar
A spectral song to right this wrong
The yellowed page
Signed and tossed away
A trail of silently flung petals.
Left behind in a yellow trail of caution in the smoldering dusk.

Monday, January 19, 2009

Can I buy magic amulets to waken my first face?
Can dry fingers of night pat my rainy freckles
when voyagers wake the legions of dust?

Day does not give way into night
nor night to morning---only monotony
yet words take once more to wing as
spectral wraiths,
wanderers greyer than death raptapping gates of answers
past ages and walls
into the great unknown,
drowning, flooding, gushing me
in echo.

Though ash is my beginning and
dust my end
I am caught in limitless colored corridors
in which my footsteps wend amazed...

Monday, December 01, 2008

December 2008

Welcome to the new month. I realize that I have not posted since October!
October, seamless, extravagant...
I recall your oranges and rusts


Already the steel grey decay of November has flown away with Summer's late birds!

December is the bonus month, added gratis to the grinding year, as a maroschino cherry to a holiday cocktail...
meditations on music...what a sweet escape!
enchanting, entrancing bouncing melody and meter...
doorway to a dream!
fantastic, vaulted chamber within
what sweet melodies run upon the strings
the disembodied puffs of angels
harmonious proportion
within ear's memory
ceasing time
if ceasing time, then ceasing mortality
then ceases fear of death
I'm dreaming of a white Christmas just like the one's I used to know

Listening to Peggy Lee, dreaming of Christmas past, pondering the strangeness of time, and if time be strange, then it is life itself that is strange. Strange but sweet. It came to me as a surprise when Pete Seeger said "music is an escape". I understood a deep truth in what he said, and here is a man who knows everything about songs which he promoted one thousand times over all the world over! Yes, music is an escape...Somehow that took the wind out of my sails since music is for me a daily obsession---a very pleasant obsession, I might add. There is nothing about music that does not fascinate me. But an escape, a crutch? I guess so.

So let's say you devote all of your life to an obsession like music that never cashes in in any practical sense and you learn that it is an escape. Does that instantly make you into a loser? Quite the contrary, as we see in Don Quixote, there is something inherently noble about a human person that devotes themselves wholeheartedly to some one or some thing without measure. The ultimate insignificance of the thing we devote actually renders the nobility of its quest nobler!

I was at a wild party on Saturday night so I am not going to mention any of the particulars of the party for fear I might inculpate my friends! After the hilarity of the evening which did not let up until well past midnight, I declared: "Maybe I partied too much," then pausing so as to let that sink in on one of the veterans, added, "well, who's to say?" And this encrusted dude says, "yeah man who's to say what's too much partying?" That gave me a laugh and then it was party over and down from the mountain. Now it's Monday night.

One of the reasons I am opening up and disclosing the truth is probably vain, but it is calculated with regard to leaving behind a literary legacy. Of all the monkeys favorite games, writing must also present a kind of escape. Dreams of indelibility, is it too much to ask? Not for Quixote.