Trying to make my song, a love song… Trying to make it, all yours. The Cicadas dancing at night , over and over, the same song plays, chafing upon tender heart strings. Violins in tempest, wrought iron stories, pinging like, footsteps on a forest floor.
Like Needles and pins, the ones that stick in our mind. Overlapping melodies from time to time. Crescent songs in the darkness of night, the dripping of tears, drifting downstream, drifting alright, drifting all night.
My song(s) will never play, not in other’s places, not in here nor in there, just black letters floating like liquid dreams. I feel the draft of cold dense clouds. I feel the heaviness of pain, like songbirds kept in canary coteries. Icons push past rich velvet cases. Inspiration, consecration, conflagrations, these make up our songs, with grains and coats of irony. No time for those things now, those that cannot last, until next time, maybe never or then again maybe, I’ll so try.
It all gets confusing, these songs that I am using. They double for themselves. They fold up and spread out again. Feelings as hard as the words they portray. No, many words that follow no path, at all. Effigies at best. But an effigy is profound, with the right kinds of song. With the push and pull of chords, past receivers and expounding alliterations, we delve into simulacra, crooning our version of that great song, feeling we have done something after-all.
Six worded songs, more than a haiku, it was more than just fun, more fun, more fun for now. Years re-pasted in the hallways, which look all too familiar, like pounds of upset visions, blurring fainted paint and changing numbers on doors so thin.
So if you wish to portray what others have said, that’s okay. Just give it a new cover and be pleased.
We can only do, what we have done. Truth born out on the terraces overlooking the ocean. Cameras blink in Kodachrome flashes, pretty little women with sunshine and sashes. The peacocks utterly arrayed, time for amorous clashes when the night is still young. Amber warmth and Tanzanite dream, the sultry shower of gentle touches, for me is lost in the dull, dark crevice. Gold and silver and a gawdy necklace, the latter seemingly to be, entirely feckless. Twins angels, soft to one’s touch, with tiny raindrops pinging on our arms. Is that pure love, in the soft flutter of butterfly wings? All the honey as an enticement, darkens. Promises reneged upon and writs of notice, like confetti, are now, a stainless brow. From Rice to Cynicism and Jake from State Farm, now insidious, irreversible.
Back in 1974, I was a kid, only 18 years and probably was witness in some way to a date rape. It sure felt like it because as I was leaving out the dorm that night, guys were pulling a train on a teen girl and some guy asked me if I wanted to have ‘some.’ I said, “no.” And besides, the choice of words haunts me too as well as the whimpering that went along with her disorientation.
I was so naive but a part of my soul has been tortured to this very day. If I knew then what I know now, I might have gone postal because I cannot imagine a crime worse than that. You see, she was drunk and whimpering. Damnit. That really pisses me off. No girl asks for ‘it.’ Not for that.
But date rape characterizations are nothing new and for the longest time just generally accepted. In the movie ‘Animal House’ the guy was contemplating having sex with a passed out underage girl. Did she ask for it? NO! Does it happen? Hell ya! Is it any wonder so many women want to spread the pain around.
Going a few years into my adult life, I had a girl friend and she was given a roofie. The net effect according to her, was she never felt the same about anything! Date-raped by her boss at the mall. She and I went through hell afterwards and my anger @ jerkoffs intensifies. My girlfriend was only pieces of ceramic, like Humpty-Dumpty, those pieces can’t always be fixed.
I suffer too, knowing that seedy men with seditious desires lay in wait, like Jack The Ripper or the Boston Strangler. In these instances the pain is far worse than death. It is a slow blood-letting of one’s spirit and sense of control. We had great times and every once in awhile we would talk.
From her bosses abuse of her, of us really, she went on a self-destructive binge with an older guy who was a criminal. Arrested for a crack ball and spending time in prison, he seemed to like finding young victims. Her sister said he liked to read magazines like ‘Barely Legal’ and ’18’. Yeah one of those! One day her sister gave me a journal she had written and she had talked to her sister about the parasite she was with and how she missed me and my steady decisions and what would I do in a particular situation. She said I am the guy that returns the shopping cart. For awhile I was miffed by that but then got the gist of what she was trying to express. She also got a disease from this miscreant, Herpes!
(She fell in love in the first place)))
For some reason these words tick me off. An otherwise innocent girl and not perfect by any means, paid the price for both of you and you both should be ashamed. And I harbor guilt for not being able to protect her from the smarmy underbelly of the beast that lurks with a touch of wind and a wiff of illicit drugs.
If her mom had not been a prostitute and subjected her to so much, she might have been able to cry on her shoulders. She could have told her Mom what he said and did and your Mom would turn away. Flushed with anger and disappointment, words she heard once upon a time. Now reverberating like a song that plays over and over on a music box. The ballerina fell suddenly and her porcelain dreams laid like a million shards of what ifs.
So let’s examine some of the dubious comments made by men and boys and mostly they are one and the same. Your high school heroes and high society icons flickered as capriciously as the stories of high school football players and date rapes. The bottom-line being the reputation of the boys and a girl who was allegedly asking for it. She was collateral damage in the game of cat and mouse.
He gave you wine or drugs and told you it was okay. He promised you everything to dance in the sheets and tomorrow he denies that he even knew you or the things you said, you couldn’t have meant, if you did say them….
Their friends and influences probably had mixed emotions about the destruction, from the boss to the drug abusing narcissist whose real romance is a synthetic cesspool of misery. Both now share in a common malady with excuses and no care for the damage they were doing.
What once was a fairy tale happiness transmogrified into a hellish world of missed chances. Where lightning does strike over and over again(in the same place) and the pain still flows, if even now to more or less a trickle. In the video above Boy Meets Girl they dance and sing with a love that we all want and yet finally, even they play a requiem to a love gone strange. To me, as I worked in the media in Tampa, the song was a fresh time. A promise. Together with Paula Abdul’s ‘Straight up’, it seemed life had spectacular promise, even after a lost preemie and the mother who ran off for a decade and a half with our daughter.
But life has second chances even if those chances require some modifications to retrofit them to make them work. I do remember what my daughter said about her 16th birthday and how much she loved me. That that was her best birthday ever. This after being lost to me from her early post natal days to about fifteen years later. Still, I would NOT change things too much because what if we never rediscovered that and that is why the blog about ‘Ten Years a Single Mother’ and her kids love for her touches my heart. Kids get the connections and their love is pure if they are loved.
The theme of this entire post is what are we going to do. Rather than just complain about the pain, how can we fix a thing? You, I and many others have lived on both sides of the track and nothing…… nothing gets fixed by complaining. We need to put people first because a warm place and a hot dinner matters.
To the abuse of women, children and the vulnerable, you and I can change the world. I have a few things going now. One is to get Emotional Support Animals and Service Pets for people who need them. Let’s teach men and society in general how to treat a lady and your kids. We need to focus on identifying potential abuse and treat the family not a case number but take care of it as a village. With compassion. No tolerance policies does not heal a family. Making rules is what politicians do. Why do we punish people like Aileen Wuornos the way we do? Why not find out where at-risk people are and help? That gives us all a better chance of surviving the obstacles in life.
From murderers to offenders of all kinds, punishment is the easy part, preventing tragedies can happen and should happen. That takes more than a Breathalyzer and seeing if you can walk a straight line. How much better will this world be with solutions and not grandstanding politicians and other nabobs using the moment for personal gain.
Education is the key to everything. Not just laws but helping people be better people. Not projecting how good we are, but how good we can all be, if we just try. Ghettos are going nowhere and neither are the homeless, the drug users and other kinds of abusers. Let’s get this done and stop maligning others. The old speck and the log thing.
In the still of the night in a remote cabin tucked away from the rest of the world, exists a place within itself. With respiratory tides of sleep, the snoring of the night is almost too faint to hear. But it resonates in subtle whispers like water-bugs on a secluded pond in the middle of an oasis. The rules are suspended here in this harbor hamlet, a tie-dyed miasma of ideas clashing and jockeying for position, we attach meaning to these subtle pinpricks. Suggestions emanating from our perceptions and the texture of skin and the warm breath of emotion.
The night’s camouflage is perfect cover for in that stillness lies the city that no one else can see. No shutterbug can capture the synergy that glows like the Northern Lights and burns in spasms upon our souls. We find meaning everywhere and like the first man and first women we discover ourselves together. Little battles form and we prepare our defense, only to find that our own sense of oneness can overcome the me. Our id is suspended and we present as a single flame. The torch burns hotter than the sun but only felt by two. The seasons give us a scale in which to measure and adding and subtracting makes it a lot better.
So I guess we live in little spaces away from the chattering crowds where we hear our own heavenly harps and the burnished clouds that come and go.
Floyd, Times Are Changin 