When, as a boy, I was expected to be cleaning my room, doing homework, weeding the garden or any of a host of other chores, I would more often than not be listening to music in my room. Or, perhaps I’d be teaching myself to sing like Robert Plant or Burton Cummings or Dan Fogelberg. I might have been writing music once I got to Junior High School or touring as a musician by the time I was a senior in High School. Suffice it to say, art, music, poetry – literature in general has shaped my life and provided many hours of delight and avoidance. It’s the mirror into which I’ve learned to see my own face. It’s also the looking glass through which I’ve learned to see others.

Music and poetry can become for all of us an answer to our disheveled hatreds, our worn out prejudices, our tired judgements and our need for a language with which to say, I see you.

Traveling light in serpentine winds

Traveling light in serpentine winds

this haughty craft, held aloft, sequestered

inside hints of journey’s end.

 ***

Earth’s edges, blunter now but rippled and dented,

provide the places safe to sing

the bawdy songs of youth, sung too soon, before

the second hand is wasted on the whirling clock.

 ****

Were it anything more than salvageable

solitudes, trapped in their dusty orbs,

such voices might bloat to consume me,

dine on my liver with older words,

rich but thick and unchartered.

 *****

So then, forage I shall for colors unmuted,

songs yet without voice, paths full-trod, seen with

eyes withholding nothing but a flute and a scalpel.

One to begin, the other to end

the sharper edges of this catastrophic

beauty – this undulating goodness.

 ******

I think I’ll take a walk.