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Not much happening on the list, so I thought I'd share some extracts from my long poem in progress, "Verlaine". In a roundabout way, it's about Tom. But it's more about trying to describe what it's like when you're listening to one of those solos and you get goosebumps and you are taken away to some other place, floating. Glenn C "Verlaine" Inside every note, there is another note and, in this way, Verlaine, you have occupied all spaces at once. The singularity. But what is astrophysics if not a form of music? If the stars are divination, you, Verlaine, are their reader, their devoted interpreter. In your guitar, all possible contingencies are set in motion, set aflame in the way a forest fire is the catalyst for regeneration. One cigarette after another, Verlaine. You are the smoke as well as the smoker. The black stain on the ceiling, yes, a Rorschach for the new century. When you bend a string, it is time itself that bends, yet never breaks, much like the snow-laden willow in the Tao that surges upward again at the first warm breath of spring. Verlaine, you are a shaman of electricity, forever searching. Exploration and evacuation. A journey of one thousand miles begins not with the first step but with an internal urging. The future must be pulled down, it is true. And in the pulling a friction to ignite a fire of fevers inside us. Let them rage, for today can never be anything but today, no matter how sturdy the promise of tomorrow. An ace up each sleeve. A play of the light. Verlaine, you are that rarest of magicians who has no need of an audience, who performs only to trick himself. Everything, really, is just the rain made solid. Even our bodies. Your job is to show us the way to fall. To transcribe the music of the planet’s turning, that’s some feat. What you remember of the dream is not the dream, Verlaine, and sleep is a tide made for fleeing. Run! Run always towards the shore, towards some new ruination. There is a fortune-telling in your strings, an unfolding. What’s speculative is always frightening, but you show us the fear of death and at the same time the death of fear. Kilby said you could make your guitar sound like anything you wanted – a bird, a gun, a siren, a plane. But it’s the rupture beneath the skin of things that we listen most closely for. In the thundery Braille of your pulse, a kite caught in a tornado. Your guitar is the centrifugal force that keeps order in its place. A new velocity for old times. You can be touched but not glimpsed. Be always in the dark, Verlaine. Emit only sparks. Do you play guitar in your dreams? Are there as yet unheard sounds? Be the waking dream with frayed edges, Verlaine. The torn curtain that moves with the breeze of the evening rain. Fruit ripens before it spoils, the parched riverbed soon enough floods. You have known change and it has known you. Be the change that we wait for. Your silence is long – but are we measuring it correctly? There is the apparent and there is the yet to be. You climb, and in the climbing, thinner air, Verlaine! Do you breathe during those solos? Be the alchemist who does not search, who transforms simply by being. Whose presence is the philosopher’s gold at the center of us all. There is time in rhyme, distance in an eye-blink. Between notes, vast space. The time for toys is past. To play is to reconfigure, and history is merely something to read about. A universe that seems to stretch infinitely and its inexplicable acceleration. And perhaps time is the only song worth singing. And sometimes distance alleviates and sometimes it doesn’t. Life is the phantom ache after the tooth’s removal. The root cause. Your guitar is the drill that never stops probing, your sound an unknown trajectory, an inversion of the compass. Notes conceal as well as illuminate. In this, you are master of disguise. Ideas born of boredom resonate the loudest. In your boredom you are the barrel going over the falls, the untethered spacewalk, the room that needs no view. What we see is not what we get. A burden – seeing beyond even that of an uninvented clairvoyance! Truth always lies in the uprooting of things. Seeking a more irregular orbit you come in and out of our field of vision, yet your presence is a constant – seize the road and your road will see you. You are its direction, Verlaine, its collapsing destination, telescoped into actuality. Rain and streetlight, curtain and constellation. These are the things that give me pause. Keep going and what you leave behind will go on, regardless. You soar and the scab is torn, the wound a freshness of forever, weeping. We must learn how to wait, and in our waiting, unexpected things, Verlaine. Uncomplicated permutations. The page you fill is torn by your own hand – and is it not in this sudden tear that we best hear you? The one into the two and the two into the one. Scatter it, Verlaine. Minutes struck by cross-currents, the electrification of the hours. Yet the sound, too, of a wind-chime swaying in the mid of the night. A new harmony. You rake through years of cold ashes. Observe the burned from the unburned but discern no difference. Yes. This is your doctrine. An entity of sound, into which soul essence enters, pulsing, germinating. And morning harnesses night for carnal purposes beyond the reach of our imagination. |