27 Years at Sea

27 years. Twenty seven years, and I’m still alive. All the childhood dreams of death at the hands of rock and roll must come to fruition this year, if I am to join the ranks of the immortals. Yet, at twenty seven I find myself more and more pleased with this different breed of happiness I have discovered. It took me years to find it, and I still surely haven’t plumbed the depths of it yet, but they have seen me through to survive until now.
There are friendships I have made, both with my family as well as with various vagabonds, dreamers, and drifters whose names I have collected along the way that have brought a stillness to the seas of my mind I could have never foreseen. Rough waters still come, though some fine day I hope to admonish them completely, but they never feel to rough to ride now. My sails have been sewn with the care of a man who has studied his mistakes like a manual, a guide for future freedom, though the fingers that did the stitching weren’t always my own. In my life I have strived to take the advice of those who had felt the icy sting of water over the rails, of those who had already spent years repairing sails, and still sought the excitement of the ride.
Twenty-seven years spent fighting, spent working, spent learning, spent seeking some path I thought would open up like golden gates and guide my way. In the end I found most direction to be misleading, most purpose to be unrealistic, and that the only difference between life and dreams was the believing. I found little reason to seek the status quo, the tourniquet tie and the quaint little debtors home. For me it was always the sea I was seeking, a world where sky meets earth in simply a different shade of blue, and there is no real direction except for the one you choose. There’s no beaten path, or road less traveled, only the motion of the waves we make, and the winds our sails have gathered.
The ride is one year shorter. This well-beaten boat, one year older. Yet I come at this year with more strength than ever before, a stronger wind at my back, a better knowledge of my ship, and those stitched up sails made stronger still by storms and war. My boat feels stronger than it will ever be and I could never presume to ask for more, but knowing how way leads on to way I know that some day I will once again find a shore, to be either battered upon, or to discover, it matters little which anymore. I have found a contentment in each, the likes of which I have never known before, a contentment that has allowed me to be lost at sea and still just calling it “free.”

A Picture of God

She said she wanted to take a picture of God; lying face up, in the middle of a field named nowhere, on the greenest patch of scorched grass we could find. The summer heat had burnt most of the green from the ground, but late at night, once the dew set in, it felt fine. She held her eye to the camera and her camera to the sky, her blonde hair pooling around her face like gold silk, covering the exact moment when she starts to cry.
I hold my breath. Believing for a second that maybe she’ll see him, maybe she’ll get the shot. Maybe she’ll come home with a photo that will change the world, leave even believers shocked. Only clouds pass, nothing very grand, no heavenly voices or glowing outstretched hands. It’s just me, her, the silence, and the sky. Holding up cameras and trying not to cry.
Somewhere across the field a tree stirs, and another, the wind sweeps the unkempt grass into waves. Brittled by the heat, the sea churns and a bird whistles her name. Goosebumps in a heat wave, she smiles, and sits up straight. Her eyes, glazed with tears and tea, she turns and looks at me. Smile, she says, and clicks the camera a couple times. Laughing, she just stares into my eyes.
On the highway home she sings along with every song and somehow it makes me feel more alone. Her sudden smile has me feeling weighted beneath my worry, though I know it’s wrong. I think two times about telling her, but once the right words come along, she finds another melody, and it’s instantly our song. So I keep my mouth shut and drive, concentrate on keeping the tears out of my eyes; and kept searching for god in the dark skies.
By the time we reach her place she has lost herself completely to space, and I wonder if she still knows I’m there. The night is wearing thin, I can smell morning in the air, when she asks me if I want to come in. I tell her no, though my real answer surely shows, as she ignores me and takes my hand. You have to understand, she says, why I took the picture when I did, the image I realized I had.
At our best, we are what we want our Gods to be, empathetic, understanding, immune to jealousy, but time grinds us down. Slowly for some, but it surely works its way around. We aren’t all devils every day, we all fall victim to our demons at different times, in different ways, but make no mistake, we are all somehow the same; something no geography, nor language, nor color of skin could ever change.
The picture I got was of God, of the many faces He finds and the shapes She takes, you were God, just to be found sitting with me in that place. Maybe there is some faceless stranger hiding in the sky, waiting for the moment we finally get off this ride, but I prefer to seek God through people’s eyes; through this strange arrangement of events we call our lives. It’s the one of the few places, I’ve found, that anything that beautiful could ever hope to survive.

Keeping Pace

She says the city’s finally got to me
And winks like she knows that I know exactly what she means
And I wonder if she’s right
Silently, because if it’s true, I’m not sure it’s something I like
I’ve recently longed to be a simple man
To seek my future without a complex plan
But she just sits and stares at me
Eyes locked on a face that she doesn’t really see
Visions of Chelsea, hotel sheets in the morning,
And the people we never came to be
She rolls her eyes,
sighs,
lifts her hands to my eyes, and replies,
Darling, one of us was bound to fall behind.

Some days I feel desolate
Empty like the city on a Sunday
And suddenly insignificant
Like a pixel of paint on a map scaled to size
It seems impossible that we’d all fit
With such enormous lives
But here we are, spinning on this little blue dot,
Fighting over pieces of paper and regions of rocks
Failing to recognize the tiny enormity of what we’ve already got
It’s what she does to me,
Like the way her hair smells like a memory
The scent comes cursed with visions of her arms clutching me
Like the whole world was a storm, and I was the strongest tree

She says the city’s changing me
That the hustle and bustle finally got to me
I’m not the man she met, she says, but that’s not the surprise,
It’s something different drifting just behind my eyes
Like I spent these last years fighting for my life
And barely made it out the other side.
And I want to disagree, but I’ve seen it too
Creeping up into almost everything I do
This overwhelming urge to redefine free
By recognizing my right to decide what it really means
I don’t have to chase dollars, I don’t even have to chase dreams
I could even choose to sit back and just watch this silly little scene
The only thing that seems to matter, the only thing I’ve found I need
Are these hearts we casually shatter, and the others I’ve gathered around me

I admit the city got to me,
The cold flow of faces turned races into trickery
And now I refuse to run.
Though I feel no sense of resignation in what I’ve done
It’s why her hand finds mine
Across some great imaginary divide
Because progress in this race is also difficult to define,
But Love means that no one ever falls behind,
So call me Mr. Slow and Steady, call me Mr. Just-in-case
Just as long she remembers that someone’s always ready
Lest she ever lose her pace

Waiting for wonderland

We were the last two left at the bar, still waiting for wonderland; trapped between spring and loneliness, we were the least likely pair to make a stand. She hadn’t been watching me and I hadn’t been looking at her, but our eyes eventually settled for what remained. It wasn’t that she wasn’t pretty, or that I wasn’t ready to be found myself, but that we were both bystander’s; we just both happened to be standing there. I walked her to her car, until she laughingly realized that she hadn’t driven there; then I walked her home.
On our way there we cracked jokes about the feet that had first tread these dirty bricks, wondering against the humid air why they decided to stay. We stopped at a light where no cars crossed, maybe to catch our breath, or maybe to try and lose it. The stop-light signaled danger but I wasn’t looking, I still kiss with my eyes closed; but the night was warm, and they were getting shorter, so we crossed the street with our stolen goods still tingling on sweaty lips.
Somewhere between the door into the complex, and the door to her tiny fifth floor apartment, I decided I wasn’t going in. I couldn’t really think of any better way to spend the evening than awkwardly exploring the more seldom seen parts of her body, but it occurred to me that it wasn’t why I had come. I might have gotten myself found, and that was all well and good, but this was just more whiskey on wounds. I had gotten enough of that.
I went back home and wrote a letter to a different girl. In a way, I suppose it was who I was really hoping to see wandering through that bar that night, though it was probably impossible, it was who I had been hoping to run into for years. Walking from that bar, and kissing underneath the caution light reminded me in a strange way, that maybe I had been living my life under a yellow light; always wondering when to go. So, instead I wrote a simple letter to a girl I didn’t really know, and signed it “From, further on up the road.” I spent the rest of the evening on a hillside, listlessly poking holes in the summer sky. No longer looking for reasons to things, just humming along to the familiar songs my mind sings.

Happiness

1:57:54 AM
Through a still quiet hallway she walks like she’s running, and I feel incredibly blessed that it’s towards me. There’s no grace in her harried steps, only the kind my eyes can find, and it’s only for me. Her guilty giggles echoing through the hallway make sweet melody to the rhythm of her slapping sandals on the tile floor. It suddenly feels like I’ve never been lonely before, like I have always been alone but never really had the precedent to know. When she folds into my arms, there’s only warmth, the chill of dreams died never touches us, and I feel alive. Not just the day to day life I lead, mostly spent in a haze of considerations both shallow and deep, but that my eyes were finally wide, that my heart pumped brand new blood, like something sleeping had woken up inside, though I couldn’t tell what. Her chin fills my shoulder. Her hair covers my face. The constant struggle of getting older suddenly finds validation in having led me to this place.
Inside we catch up on each others lives, trade the tales about how we’ve survived. Not just conversation for talking’s sake, but moved into words by what the other had to say, an actual exchange of ideas in a meaningful way. The type of thing I really like, the kind of thing I have been looking for my whole life, which is probably clear to her by my face, plastered into an awkward smile, that I might never erase. She knows that smile, though, she could spot it from a mile, the kind that threatens to be content enough to carry on when everything else is going wrong. One that will clearly come through when the nights get long. She moves like music through my one room, thick and slow, like oil, or smoke through the flume. Every shift of her body is sex and she feels it too.
When the golden globe found the horizon, we felt like strangers again. Blessed to have the chance to learn each other’s story again. Over off hour coffee we trade minds, having shared lives for a time, but she blames it on the wine. A humble lie, I can see it in her eyes. Like a soft distant sunrise, glowing blue and bright, just as it was beginning to look outside. She sips her coffee slow, as if we’re nothing but simple souls, seeing nothing but the slow sweat gathering on the tip of each others nose. I wanted to cry. The whole thing felt just too beautiful to hold inside. But for fear of betrayal of the moment, I kept my silence, knowing I might never again find this, I simply reveled in the careless curve of her smile. 
Awake, for the first time, I feel free and I am certain I see it on her face. Not so much a weight lifted, but more precisely a burden ignored, like her kiss, gently lifting me from the floor, and not a single moment of pre-history seems a waste. Every broken back, down low, never coming back moment means maybe more than it ever did. Like maybe each one was a well-wrapped gift and it took this to appreciate it. All the mistakes, and frustrated second takes, the dreams deferred and lessons hard learned, the days spent wasted and the wasted spent days, I never thought it would turn out this way but if it does I would be honored to stay.
This, I know, is where I belong, caught up in a moment that goes on and on and on and on, and when I think of forever I think of this. A perpetual moment, casually passing as bliss. Sipping coffee naked, watching the sun rise. Cautiously sharing real life, because if it was a dream, it should feel like this, and if it is our life, well, I’d be avaricious to wish for any thing more than this. Chuckling, I pour her another cup, and think, so this is what happiness is.

Meant For More Than This

So this is my first post in a while, and the first song I have written in a while, so don’t go expecting miracles, but I found myself once again so happy to have completed a thought that I wanted to share. I have been listening to a lot of new music lately and doing some more serious work recording with the fella’s and it has really pushed me to get back into writing. For the last couple of weeks life has had me pretty busy and every night I have sat down to write I have just wound up staring at the blank page. So here’s to a coherent-ish thought.
Writing is such a haphazard proccess for me, that it’s tough to describe my thought process behind any particular song or piece I have written, especially something as open ended as this is intended to be. I have been trying to write more melodies and less poetry when doing the song thing, so I’m additionally scared this won’t really read as well as it sounds, but who cares? Right?

What I wanted to tell you
Just so apropos
Imbued with this darkness
Thats been seeping into my soul
What I wanted to say
Before the words left my lips
We were not made this way
We were meant for more than this

What I wanted to lay open
What I wanted to let in
So timorous now of losing
But I’ll take it on the chin
What I meant to deliver
I never intended to suggest
Drowning in silence like a river
We were meant for more than this

I never meant to imply
I guess I never imagined
The impersonal ridicule of a lie
Or the way it becomes a habit
Though I had wished I were wrong
Baby I confess
That I knew all along
we were meant for more than this

Our Greatest Gift

Standing on my toes watching angels build roads a thought occurred to me and it wouldn’t leave me alone. How monstrous we must seem to them, whatever heavenly body you believe in; what shallow greedy creatures we must appear to be. Listlessly puttering through our days, worried about paychecks, property, and less meaningful things. ‘There are people starving’ they’d say, ‘your sister is starving.’
They surely wouldn’t be surprised when we all turned our heads to look, poured some of that important paper on the problem, and claimed exclusive rights to the book. “It’s just their way.” they’d probably say, shaking their head in some disenchanted way. “Like the colors of the world, each one is beautiful in its own unique way, but put too many together and they can make some fairly ugly things.”
What would the world be without those worries, though? Without monetary success, how would anyone know? Are we so selfish that we won’t work for the good of one another? Will we always hide behind how hard it is for one man to make it even if we starve the other. Because how hard would it be if we all pitched in? Invested in one another instead of simply ourselves again and again. How much one on one help could one need if one wasn’t all it was about?
How hollow must our prayers seem when the tools of our own salvation have so long readily sat at hand. How silly must we appear to let language or color, religion or philosophy, keep our legs shaky and unable to finally stand. “They squander the greatest gift they were ever given,” I can almost hear those angels frustratedly mutter, “I hope they can be forgiven, and realize at long last, all they ever really had was one another.”

All I’ll Ever Be

Rumbling from the distance, thunder in February seemed only appropriate, things being what they were. So late on in the evening I thought for a minute that the storm might be my little secret. As if the whole world had dazed off to let me be alone with this moment. For those few seconds of silence all of time seemed wrapped up inside it.
I’m ten years old watching storms roll outside the bay window in our house, wondering why the lightning never looks the same, and whether God really has such trustworthy aim. Fifteen, professing my love on the back of a north-bound bus. New York is the last dot we’ve got marked on the map, but we would have been happy watching the whole world pass by, right where we sat. I’m nineteen and angry, finally discovering that some of my most carefully laid plans will fail me; twenty-three and lonely, slowly learning the true meaning of family.
Over the years since I have found a variety of things to occupy my mind, my education, my soul, and my proverbial piece of the pie. These days I stand in awe of the love I’ve found, and the unabashed way those I love spread that feeling around. I used to believe that we were the journey, the story, the tangled tale of our lives let loose upon the world. That each and every morning woke up to a new and improved version of ourselves. Late at night, spiraling through lives that barely look like mine, lit by the light of this strange city’s glow, I know.
Sometimes I wish that I had no one to disappoint; that the dreams pertaining to my particular life were only mine, and had no greater point. No potential to live up to, no precedent to surpass. Just me, my ambition, and my hands at task. What would I be? I wonder what it would be like if I were all alone, maybe traveling westward, but definitely without a home. To recuse myself from the bustling bees, take the time to look around, and finally breathe.
Yet, here I sit, turning over the story of my life like anyone still gives a shit. Still making excuses for the way things have gone, with that sinking feeling in my stomach like something is wrong. We are only what we allow ourselves to be, the ever-changing unique sum of the things that we see. God’s children or not we are only what we believe. For better or worse, it’s all we’ll ever be.

Morning

It is amazing to me, sometimes, how much I didn’t know that I knew when I was younger. Being a writer, of sorts, I get the chance to see it a lot. I can skim back through the things that I have written and find new depth in the words. Depth I still struggle to attain in my words today. There is a mature beauty in the following post, despite it being written about 4 years ago, that I now see as being far ahead of my own mind at the time. It is as if, for a moment, I managed to climb out of my simple mind and see beyond the horizon for a little while.
I have tried updating the post from time to time, but it has never really been better than this. I have tried picking it apart for things that I would do better and I just couldn’t find any. It’s my perfect explanation of a memory. One of the still central purposes to my writing today. I don’t know that it will have the same effect on anyone else as it has had on me, but I could read it a thousand times. If for no other reason, I’m reposting it here.

        It’s already bright, a couple of the hours that only summer light claims, and there’s still fog hovering over the grass. It’s too early to see the darkened footprints of anyone who may have tread past, no one’s up yet. Morning silence, that low hum of birds chirping, broken occasionally by the chirping of a trash truck backing up; there’s no other sound like it. The world, asleep in their beds, or just now waking, makes a low symphony that only seems to add to the thickness of the fog at our ankles. Like angels we stand all alone together, watching the slow sun gently breaking over the horizon line. We almost don’t notice the time slip by at all; just her hand in mine because that’s where it belongs, not because it should be. Of course I look over at her first, but she doesn’t flinch, and after a second I turn my head back around.
       Over the running fields and bustling city streets, into movie theaters and friends basements, outside, underneath the galaxy, poking holes in the midnight sky, and inside her room, finding faces in the ceiling swirls and comparing; we were just sons and daughters. Too young to know the gravity of the words we couldn’t say, and just old enough to find other ways of telling each other, we were once the best kind of lovers: innocent, passionate, and utterly lost in one another. Now we’re men and women, shed of the places we once called home, and the voices of many of those who inhabited it. We stand poised on hilltops with our senses to the wind and our cares, heavy on our shoulders. Her hand clasps tighter and I can see her looking at me out of the corner of my eye. Her eyes scanning my form, remembering the shadows that once hid my eyes and my smile.
     The late spring grass is thick now, the ground still a bit spongy from the rains before. I settle my bare feet into the earth a little more and feel some kind of renewed strength in the still cool topsoil. The dew from the grass has coated my feet and the bottoms of my pant legs, but it’s the smell that brings the most clarity. A thick scent, a mix of moisture, the smell of grass, and just a hint of her perfume, reminds me why I’m here. I’ve come for some sort of redemption, some justice for the crimes I’ve committed. I’ve come for vindication against those that have sought to hold me back. I came to see the faces behind the masks, the words behind the silence, and to maybe find some truth to the promise; the only promise, life indefinite. I came for the sunrise, and for her, because the combination of the two bring meaning to all these swirling mistakes.
       I know when we turn around to go back we’ll see how we got here. We’ll see our footprints are the only spots on the grass that don’t shimmer really. Then we’ll walk back, in silence, to the car and somewhere along the drive we’ll forget we ever did this. Our pant legs will dry and the heater will warm our dirty wet feet, and we’ll both get swept up again in all that this world has to offer us. We’ll go back to what ever place it is we’ve found to call home, and find things to pass the worried time. But surely, someday, we’ll come back here again, and wonder what it must have felt like to be us.

Orphans of the American Dream

One long strange night, we took the time to remember why we were friends. Cooped up in a house, surrounded by the cold in all directions, we told tall tales about the places we had been. Orphans of the American dream, one and all, we knew our words moved no mountains, rattled no cages but our own, it still felt good to be heard, to be understood, to feel known.
We had all climbed various ladders in our lives, and subsequently found them utterly unfit for our kinds of minds. It’s not that we felt we were special, more specifically, that everyone else had been fooled. Tricked by little gifts given at just the right time to make them believe in the beauty of more. While we sat smiling, drinking beer, laughing, and developing ground breaking philosophy seated comfortably on the floor.
We began to feel pity for those we saw as trapped like rats on a wheel, forced to beg borrow and steal, just to make it to their next carefully arranged meal. Hopefully relying on the coming horizon to bring their ship to shore, to finally bring upon them that great American Dream of the infinite, never waivering, more. In spite of all that, there we sat, telling tales of the dreams we threw away, with the kind of smiles they might never know, and could never fake.
Over the week we’ll all punch in and earn our keep, but it’s never what matters, it’s never what we think about when we’re going to sleep. It’s these stories we keep, and the faces and names that haunt them because we’ve started to understand fate. Started to see that it’s never been about zeros in some account, but rather the souls we touch and meet, and we could never keep count.
Clued in too early, we may become victims of this conclusion, most people are way past our age before they see past the illusion. It’s tough to play along with something so many people believe in so strong, like going to church but getting the words to every prayer all wrong, it feels disrespectful to just pretend like you’re really in to what’s going on. We earn just enough to pay our way and when it comes time, we don’t let them have any input on how we play. It’s just how we’ve learned to do things. We, the orphans of the American dream.