Hawks

I'm in orbit
Held by magnet
And the force fields
So much closer than love

Logic offers no defense
Underneath this influence

Stop the room please, I'd like to get off. I'm tired of the wavering spiral of spinning the same mistakes over and over hoping for a different result. I'm not stupid, I remember the lectures from since I was little. "Do you know what the definition of insanity is? It's doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result." Well, Dad, I'm insane. The reverse psychology worked. Fear is the great death, the kryptonite, the nemesis of motivation. Of change. And the world, oh god, the world is full of so many things to be afraid of, just in my own house.

I'm such a perfectionist. Always been so hell bent on doing the things I know how to do well. I have a niggling habit of doing what I'm perfect at over and over. But I have tread a hole clear through this plane, carved myself into this rut till I've caught fire from the constant friction of moving in the same place. I'm perfect at being comfortable, I'm perfect at lying. I'm perfect at thinking if I don't do something, I can't fail at it. I'm perfect at being afraid. I'm perfect at starting things I never finish. I'm perfect at telling you what you want to hear. I'm perfect at listening to music in the middle of the night and writing things that I will never let anyone else read. I'm perfect at killing an idea before it turns into something I can't control.

The sky is faint, their tears remain
In me the rain has stopped falling
The fading light, walls barely white
In me the night has stopped calling

I will not lament with the sky
No longer feel night on the inside

 How do you kickstart yourself back into progression? Heh... back into progression... that might be the problem.

Sow the seeds
Of everything to be
Safe in sleep
I winter in my dreams

Speak your words
Define my grief for me
Out of reach
Some things just can not be

It's stretching like a tear, yeah? How much is left on the page? Why do I always have to have the edges defined? I want a motorcycle, I want to ride it till I'm over my fear of the edges of things. Till all the roads blur into one road and they don't scare me anymore. Till the country can just be the country and not all in pieces.

I'm so sick of everything being in pieces.

I have to go find some Pink Floyd and bury this internal head back in the sand of trivial things, the roaring keeps me up. It frightens the hawks that circle, on wide wings, in the expanse overhead.

Love Love Love

The point of the song is, you know, that we are fairly well damaged by the legacy of the Romantic poets--that we think of love as this, you know, thing that is accompanied by strings and it's a force for good, and if something bad happens then that's not love. And the therapeutic tradition that I come from--I used to work in therapy--you know, also says that it's not love if it feels bad. I don't know so much about that. I don't know that the Greeks weren't right. I think they were--that love can eat a path through everything--that it will destroy a lot of things on the way to its own objective, which is just its expression of itself, you know. I mean, my stepfather loved his family, right? Now he mistreated us terribly quite often, but he loved us. And, you know, well, that to me is something worth commenting on in the hopes of undoing a lot of what I perceive as terrible damage in the way people talk about this--love is this benign, comfortable force. It's not that. It's wild, you know? - John Darnielle, of The Mountain Goats

Been listening to this song a lot today, every couple songs that shuffle up on my iTunes, I come back to this one, replay it. It's a beautiful song. I think I've been listening to it so much, because this idea has been on my mind the past few days.

I've been working the last month on archiving my poetry, trying to track it all down from various places, various looseleaf sheets in my filing cabinet and notebooks, stagnant internet corners.

So many of the poems I remember writing, and wish that I still had, are lost, or missing, or scribbled out. Looking back, I wish I hadn't at the time. I wish I hadn't thrown them away, or defaced them. They were such an insight into my emotions, small filmstrips of memory and moment.

In all the efforts to conglomerate, I've been contemplating why I write poetry, why it's important to me, something that I've always been compelled to do. Leonard Cohen once said, "Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash."

Poetry for me, is love, is evidence of life. That if you live, you love, and that poetry is the expression of life, of love, and that even the sad poems, the hard poems, the ones that don't seem to be anything but dark or miserable, they're all about love.

Every poem is a love poem, every song is a love song. Every emotion is an expression of love, is a consequence of love, is the way that love moves through us, or the way we move through things without it, in search of it.

This is a song about poetry, and life, and the things - the thing - that makes either of those important, and more importantly, that makes them true.

Some things you'll do for money, and some you'll do for fun...some moments last forever, and some flare out with love, love, love.