Sometimes when it’s cold out here in the country, a mouse wanders into the drop ceiling, and makes a scampering ruckus. I know what he sounds like by now.
Once when it was hot, a lizard found his way up there. It took me a while to figure that one out. Ah, a little dragon.
Something has been rustling over my eyes, closer than the ceiling.
The questions. Half-formed, vague, persistent.
It sounds like they’re wrestling.
RVA All Day
Richmond was gracious. Two talks on Chicago blues, another on Ragtime, that one for the dementia ward. A kindly nurse saved me from the lady who kept trying to smack my behind.
“Let’s sit down and leave him alone, Ms. Jones.”
They all gathered and listened and we laughed and carried on and sang to the “raggedy time” of Scott Joplin and felt the grooves on a record and cranked the victrola like it was 1899.
The story ended, and still they sat, all gathered, waiting. So we pulled up a video of Beethoven’s 7th symphony on the TV, and I left them in better hands than Judge Judy.
The road back to Lynchburg unfurled through the last day of spring, the lowering gray sky matching the weary concrete highway, the dull green of professional grade chlorophyll separating both infinities. Gone were the whimsical experiments in green that early spring gifts us each year. Trees become industrial about photosynthesis ‘round the solstice.
They need to make stuff.
So do I.
(Maybe?)
Seems a shame to waste opportunity.
“Artists”
The tires sang me into the reverie of the miles. Sometimes we “artists” retreat into the jungle of our thoughts, and emerge with something valuable.
Sometimes we just go there to sulk.
When I go birdwatching in the real woods, sometimes I get a visual confirmation. “Ah, a red-eyed vireo.” (These names, man.) They’re usually just heard, though, identified by their song.
When I go a-thinking, it’s often the same, with snatches of something floating through the humid air, a distant trill that might be something new (and might not.)
The tires kept singing. This song came on. Have a poem while you listen.
Thoughts of a Stealth Fighter
Green elephants of Kudzu vine
Tower along the highway
Trumpet at me flying by
a mile a minute
The fields are crowded with emptiness
And round bales of hay for herds unseen
Is winter really even a thing to prepare for?
I think things useless and vital
Shaking hands sifting the need to be Somebody from the Duty to Stand
The key to my prison hidden among these shards
Oh, if I could only concentrate
Did we break things because we were bored like Fyodor said we might
If the scent of Cinnabun in the malls choked out any real challenge?
The effigies of the End, puppets of our fantasy
Lying as Pinocchio
Spring to life as soldiers
“Words can be violence, so we’re here to take your guns”
“Make my day, fulfil my wish, engage on me with at the level where I find meaning in misguided righteousness, I have a thesaurus.”
Then a man asks what fruits we’d like to reap
The ones of war or peace?
An adult in the room
Who has every reason to duck and cower
But he doesn’t.
Here I am, joined to my enemy
Online
in Holy Sanctimony
Endless gnashing of keys.
I think I’d like a divorce from this way of thinking.
I think I’ll instigate it
By asking my “enemies” to dinner.
***
(I’m serious. )
-Josh