So Long Ago

My first attempt at song lyrics… I’ve been wanting to write song lyrics for a long time, and a few days ago I was listening to a Silversun Pickups song, Kissing Families, it’s so beautiful, I love that it has a cello and the vocals are amazing, he has such a unique voice. I was so inspired that I felt compelled to write my own lyrics, not to replace theirs, which are exquisite, but because I felt these words so powerfully while I was listening to this song. So anyway, here’s my version, called “So Long Ago.” Now if only I can find a vocalist to record the lyrics I’d be happy. It feels weird to read the lyrics of a song without the music, so listen to the song and then try to envision my lyrics over the ones that are there. I know you can do it.

The season fell, last drop of rain

A tree’s regret, we felt a sting

Your burnt sketch a pile of ash, so what

 

I’m not there are you?

 

Our first kiss, I can’t recall

Climbing the ladder to let go of it all

Your broken record my solace ’til now

It’s your gaping affliction from a stained past,

The tarnished heart that you possess.

 

My nudity is forgotten and beautiful,

But now I’m gone and you’re too late.

It’s that I’m forgotten and ruined now.

So soon you’re gone and it’s too late.

 

Thank God our love is now closed.

 

Now the season’s gone, it seems too late.

It seems too late.

 

Well, sure as Hell your heart’s so close!

My window still calls, I see your face

The blinding gash, in me, you’ll never feel

But now I’m gone and you’re too late

 

Well, I think it was you I wanted that day!

It’s so long ago that I can’t say

The sound of your voice, your kiss, your face and neck.

Well, now that’s gone and I’m too late.

Thank God it’s over…

Warm Gun

I think I’ve written a “warm gun” before. Always tastes better the second time.

There is something that I’ve lost in the past year. I’ve lost it and I think I am on the precipice of recapturing it. To covet and caress and hold it, never to let it go again. I remember waking up some days before, loving everything, even the job I hated. I loved to smile. Meet people. Talk. Speak Spanish. Learn French. Be myself. Be alone and together and everywhere.

The return! I am surely in love with being alive. I am surely on the cusp of continuing my love affair, despite its interruption. Almost as if it snuck out the back door when I wasn’t looking, this happiness, this love affair, it bounded off into the night to play upon a mountain, probably a peak in the Alps somewhere, while I was stuck here slowly melting into a lifeless form, too distracted to even notice that anything was missing.

I met someone amazing. This person has witnessed darkness and devastation like to other. Loss! Oh the loss and the grief. But the smile, the love that emanates from this person is enchanting. Every time I see that face I feel as though I could do anything. Inspiring, beautiful, kind, loving and more than anything, so, so compassionate. Anyone can fall in love with that.

It is not often I meet amazing people. The type of person that makes you stop and think about life, the type of person that really captures you, haunts you. I’ve traveled the world and I can count on one hand the number of amazing people I have met. But I love them for that. They come and whisk away my imagination and then I am forced to love them. It’s such a wonderful feeling, to be amazed by someone and love them for it. To feel like they can teach you something, show you something, surprise you and give you something new.

And it is so easy to be happy, it is. It is a choice. A simple choice. Sometimes it’s so simple and obvious that you don’t see it in front of you. A wall, a person, an event. They stand and in their shadow drowns the choice, but it’s still there. It will never abandon us, because it is the one thing we truly have as our own… choice. It is impossible to have a person. I’ve tried. You cannot have and keep a person, truly. They appear to be yours, to be a part of your forever, the painting that you so tediously spread on your canvas, all the careful brush strokes, color, attention, and creativity that you give it, and then the person gets up and is tired of you, doesn’t want to listen anymore, and you are frustrated, and you do the same, and then the dance begins, the tiresome dance of preservation. The painting is burned, along with the person. All you have left are memories, tiny pictures. And then you forget those too, and the voices, and the music even. All the things that came with the person you wanted to have, all those things are gone and you have ash. And happiness, because happiness is a choice. And so is that warm gun.

Poetry

When I write poetry, I like to ignore technology.

It Never Was

“It’s not that I didn’t do things right,” I tell myself
at night, laying in bed half gone, my lids
effervescent under the moon’s full gaze.
It is surreal, makes sense only on the precipice of sleep
in the sweetness of that tender light’s caress,
only when I am alone in bed and he isn’t there,
the darkness wraps around itself into that bare sheet
where he used to lay and sometimes at night
when I was just on the threshold of a dream,
he would kiss my shoulder, and then sleep
was elusive until it became the pinnacle
of that final moment.
As if that moment were the only thing to live for,
and sleep was sweeter because of it!

Elusive sleep. Now I can capture it only after I douse
my mind in solvent, anything to help the memories drip away
to their death.
And each morning after the battle for sleep is won,
I step into the graveyard of my past, repeating, repeating, repeating,
“It’s not because I’m not beautiful enough, intelligent enough, profound enough. It’s not because I’m not creative or poetic enough. It’s not because I didn’t love or I didn’t care or I didn’t… it’s not…it’s not…it’s not…”

An Understanding V – On Love and the Present

I have been writing about the past for a while, trying to sum up some things and reflect, but now I think I will write about the present.

I am lonely, but at the same time I am busy. I feel that I have a lot of love in my heart, and every day it stays there and seems to have no place to go. Don’t get me wrong. I love my friends and they make me happy when we are together. But when I am alone… I FEEL very alone. I try to keep myself busy at all times, working, taking pictures, setting up photo shoots, hanging out with my friends, both old and new. My latest project is a mixed media piece for an art show in August and some movie/film-inspired photo shoots. When I’m working I feel good. I cleaned my house and moved from the master bedroom to a smaller bedroom. I have meetings this week. I just got my new website up and running.

All of these things are reasons to be happy. My past is a reason to be happy! Though it’s marred with some unfortunate events, it has been interesting, and the bad times have helped to intensify the good times. The good times were GREAT. It has been a pleasure to relive the past and think about my life.

But sometimes, during moments when my mind has time to wander, I come back to my loneliness and yearning. I want to run away from it, escape it, and I think of all the places I could go. New York, San Francisco, I’ve even thought of France or going back to Ecuador. This empty feeling couldn’t possibly persist in France, right? Well, I know better than that. It is childish of me to think that the feeling that I have right now would disappear, the feeling that there is something missing from deep inside of me, the feeling that I am just on the edge of a precipice and that the smallest breeze would take me down into the deep abyss, that feeling exists in France and New York and San Francisco too. That feeling exists wherever there is humanity. We just have to learn to deal with it.

So many people have written about love. Just in the past two hours I’ve read numerous stories, love letters, poetry, blogs on love, love, love, love! It is sickening. It makes my entire body hurt, because I want to write beautiful things about love, but I feel nothing but pain when I think about it. It becomes hard to swallow. It burns my eyes. I have trouble breathing.

I am going to try anyway…

It was like someone took the happiness that I felt in life, the happiness of being me, living my own life and owning it, being independent, feeling free and beautiful and creative, it was like someone took that and MAGNIFIED it, made it exponentially better, as if life COULD get any better. I was so happy before, and then… it just got better. I didn’t think it could get any better than that. But it did. I was so happy I stopped sleeping. I went to bed at 5 am and woke up at 8 am. I didn’t feel tired. Everything I did was enjoyable, even something so simple as eating ice cream at 11 pm. My skin glowed and I felt beautiful. I loved looking in the mirror, because I saw what he loved and I loved it too. I loved myself more than I had ever done in my entire life, because he loved me that much. I was on top of the world, nothing could touch me. I laughed so much. I laughed all the time and my smile was unstoppable. I wanted to create, I was so inspired – poetry, photography, even sketching and painting, which I hadn’t done in years. All these things poured out of me. I had this twitch in my stomach when he walked into the room or when I heard his name. I was soaring and didn’t think of the future or the past, just the present. Just love. I thought of how exciting my life seemed, all the excitement that this feeling bestowed upon everything, even laying in bed and watching a movie and laughing until the wee hours of the morning or laying in my tiny room reading poetry while he played the guitar. We spent so many wonderful hours in that tiny room, that tiny universe that seemed so complete. Suddenly all the incredible things I had done and places I had been and people I had met, became mere trivialities in the face of such ecstasy. I thought of Ecuador and France and London and Portugal and Costa Rica, and all the many places I had lived, traveled and experienced. And they were beautiful, but small, distant, and all I could think about was the love I felt and how I never wanted this to end, how I could go on in this little city of St. Petersburg, FL, and live here forever and just feel like this eternally. ME! The traveler, the adventurer, the vagabond. This passion gave me roots! I had never felt like this before, it just hit me and I accepted it and gave back all that I could. It was so easy to give when I felt so blissful. I would have given anything, everything. I did give all I had. I would continue to give everything. To see the morning light pour over someone’s face and have that one simple vision be your entire world. To wake up in the morning and gaze at a sleeping face that is a work of art, inimitable and almost unreal. You have to pinch yourself to make sure you are real in that moment, to make sure that what you feel is true and that you are not still sleeping, dreaming in a world that will never be. I felt so healthy and vibrant, I felt like a child! Even when I was a child things didn’t seem so simple. And that was just it! It was so powerful and overwhelming that it conversely became simple, because something so total, so consuming is, by definition, simple. Unarguable. Undeniable. No gray area. Just pure happiness. Sometimes happiness so intense that tears well up in your eyes. And I didn’t question it. Just let it wash over me and cleanse me. I was whole and full and content. So simple.

To me, that is love. It is real. I lived it. No speculation, just truth. I am not writing about something that eludes me, that seems unreachable and intangible and ethereal. I have FELT ethereal. I am not taking what others have said and felt and applying them to my life, because I don’t need them. I understand love and what it feels like. The above is a documentation of facts, and though they may sound poetic, those words are nothing more than a factual account of a real love that consumes my entire being. There is nothing quite like it. Never in my life could I have imagined it. Neither can you, unless you’ve been there. So many people want it, search for it, ache for it, but it can only come to you when you feel complete in yourself. It comes to you just when you feel that life couldn’t get any better. Then love happens, and you realize the truth of all the poetry, all the heart-wrenching love letters and music and stories, you feel it all and you know that it exists and that it wasn’t just someone being creative and romantic, but someone being honest.