25 June 2010

Untitled: Part 1

Spotlight hits the stage as she walks the bulb-lit path. She sashays intentionally towards the the crowded club and draws the microphone near. Swiftly she turns and catches a glimpse of the water condensing on her piano player's Whiskey drink as he hits the downbeat.

Were it only a few years before there would had been no club or spotlight to speak of. The past had nothing remotely musical to offer. Nobody ever said it but really that is why her music was something special. Singing her perseverance, dancing her strength, and projecting her victories by mouthing words of cheap love to a melody. "Rich lungs," her manager says while putting out a cigarette, "she was born with them."

Jazzy rhythms pulse through the crowded club. A glass breaks followed by sarcastic applause of a over-dressed man with a thin mustache at the end of the dim bar. "I hope that was his drink," says the singer, "because that is my applause." He receives the remark sardonically bowing and giving her his half-witted attention.

Swelling and stopping her voice holds captive the moment in time. Beads from her dress tapping at the microphone stand while she masterfully shifts back and forth to the rhythm. Were it simply music the crowd could casually live in yet another night but this night is no longer their own.

16 June 2010

To the Painters

This excerpt was written by Richard Howard from his 1979 book, Misgivings. I wanted to use his words to dedicate attention to the Gulf Oil disaster currently polluting our precious ocean.

On the United States, Considered as a Landscape

Not a building, this earth, not a cage,
these waters: the country is
a body, to be treated so: when
the weather is mild, think
of the past, when the weather is mean,
think of the future. Men do
thus, and evolve a metropolis
from litter: leaves, straw, floating
bottles and boxes, a mainland which,
like anything else, cannot
be made all at once to drop its rags,
suddenly to stand naked,
fully disclosed. Time- it has taken
time to collect in wide pools
even the beginnings, skeleton
and cartilege, arteries
and bladder: if our Sublime cannot
rise above such things as beer
cans and plastic picnic forks, it is
not all we say, it cannot
really be the God in which we trust.

Image borrowed from: http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/oceanography-book/Images/ixtox1.jpg