Tag: music
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a loner in isolation
I don’t keep anything in my pockets. That was the first thing I noticed, gosh, back when I still had to move my car. My chapstick and pens sit on the desk and my car stays put except for weekly street sweeping (though I don’t hear them come by so don’t think I even need…
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On Hearing Notes Composed in Mourning
I attended a concert of classical music this evening. The final piece, “Ode to Lord Buckley,” composed by David Amram, was written after the death of the titular entertainer. Amram knew him well. What follows is a scant account of the performance’s sublimity, composed by myself. The saxophonist scoops notes penned in memoriam and hurls…
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Envy
I want your Kevlar skin evolutionarily engineered to banish the blades, the bullets, the bad omens. I want your ‘fuck the world’ attitude the known, flawed self unhindered by inevitable judgement no blood loss no bullshit no brown nose no nothing but grit and gums and safety pins because they owe you, and not the…
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Burning the Tracks
A red glow washed over the amorphous designs on the table. Thin, bent tubes housing neon bordered the metallic siding. She sat in the hollow space carved out by the fish tank wall wrapping behind their customary booth. He hadn’t answered her question, the question she had asked him her to pose. She knew he…
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Cinematic
It is a little-known fact that when you look at the back of a movie poster you see a mirror image of the picture on the front. The same goes for how the images look when you stand behind the movie screen itself. Spend enough time in the seats of a cinema, and you will…
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Fodder for Retrospect
The limp expression on his face was nothing new, but it still tore gently into Monica’s chest each time she looked at her son. With each tear in the fabric of motherhood, she buried the urge to give up, to send him to another doctor, to admit to the nagging suspicion that she might be…
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Overcrowded Consciousness
You lay down just past dusk, your back on a forest floor. You are surrounded by tall trees. Eyes are open, skyward. You listen. Before long, you become aware of a warm, static humming originating from the recess of your mind. Concentrating on the hum, you realize a mash-up of songs you have memorized, rendered…
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The You Not Looking
Something’s been holding back the words. It might be the version of me that’ll read these lines one day. Winding me down back roads toward a painted horizon, as fabricated as one on the set of an old western. Pulling my eyes from the one I’m driving towards. Still, something’s been holding back the words.…
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Perpetual Discovery
Seize each breath with the satisfaction of knowing that newness is around each and every bend in the day. Pull the air in deeply. Expel it in due rhythm. Attune yourself to the lyrics of the song you’ve never listened to close enough to realize how precisely they describe your current situation. Imprint to your…
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Knee-high by the Fourth of July
On the opposite side of the road passed the third pickup he’d seen that afternoon donning an oversized American flag waving in the blackened air behind the cab’s smokestack exhaust pipes. Patriotism, he thought as stomach acid warmed his chest, muddied and misled. The giant flag, strung from a 4’’X4’’ wooden post, flapped in animated…
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Attic
All day I have been hearing jazz faintly playing in my room. It does not seep through the wall nor does it rise from the chambers below. The riffs are generated within my mind. My ears glimpse phantom sound waves—unseen, invisible. Their nonexistence will startle me any longer. For I am a music box of…
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Spoon Licks
Bits of ground coffee lodged themselves in between what teeth were still sticking in his beet-red gums. The tip of a rollie hung gently from the top of his lip while he humbled, that is hummed and mumbled, some conjured-up words to nestle between the clankity clanking tings he made while the spoons hit themselves,…
Sophisticating the Rudimentary 