this is not the worst thing that could have happened after a few days with a little food, and a little sleep, and a lot of coffee. riding madly thru the streets of phoenix to get a little girl home after her bedtime, bouncing between cars because i am faster than sound when my head is cool, white lightning in my head, and i am not confused. this is different than yesterday.
a short man in a hat gives me hope for the place i live, and troy davis leaving the world gives me doubt and too much sadness for that same world. but not so much the city, which is also different than yesterday. tonight i want to sweat on september nights in phoenix, i want to sweat next to the steroid drunks who bumped my little girl (they didn't know, they didn't understand, we were there with fucking helmets, this is not supposed to be a war, but we are clearly in a war, class and race and gender warfare, and everyone i love has something at stake). i want to be sweating in phoenix right now, loving and working and making art with these people. there's hope here, and some of the ones who have given up hope are doing very interesting things with their time.
but listen, i am terribly choked up tonight, and it's hard to see as straight as i would like. and i keep getting reminded that my eyes are so much worse than they were at the beginning of the year...i have the eyes of the father (and i don't mean dad)...but that dad, the biological one, is where i start to stammer and can't speak as well as i think i should. these things come back, and while there are things that can be done, the same lightning that flashes through my tongue flashes through the surgical steel and i hope it can surge through his body without taking it off the surface of the waking world. i am too tired to want to think about the things that he gave me when i was the child on the couch when he was trying to take away the pain on so many sleepless nights. children are sleepless in my family, and when we are adults, our hearts are anxious, and they twitch and murmur, and it always makes me think about lost love.
so tonight i have a stammering stuttering song that can't quite make it to my lips, like the bird in my throat is too fluttery to make a clear sound, so it just sounds like this.
bells come to wake me up, nothing better than waking up to a bell that comes, and the sweetest bell in the world is a bell, is still a bell, and all these miles have done nothing to erase that cool silver lightning love that flowed and flowered in my veins when i was captured into knowing you.
tonight i can see that there are more mountains and more rain, and more stories to sing about the things that happen on the floor of the desert and on the stairwell at the lips of the sea, and it doesn't matter how much i put my anxious heart on my altars and ask it to stop singing about you, it doesn't stop singing. and it shouldn't make me choke as much as it does when the cards tell me clearly that you're still there in the center, that you never did leave the home that i built for you there, and there's a fire that still burns.
and it burns my veins, and it burns my skin, and it burns my eyes until everything small becomes blurry, and the larger details are all that i can really focus on. i am all forest and no trees, but i do know that when i enter into new forests, i do get lost there, and i like being lost, because my heart knows where to go.
this is a song about lost love, about losing something i can't ever really lose, and finding things, small traces of things that i want to know. let the fire in my veins guide me, then, since no external gods will show me how to leave with any kind of grace, or hyper-phallogocentric finality, let the things that burn in me take me forward and move me through the world like a machine that knows the channels of these concrete rivers that line the floor of my sweat-soaked home. this is where european and latin and native bloods have to either fight or mix, and on some nights, a bit of both is how we learn to invent a fiercely local tango, one that dances around the home in our heart. the endless longing is not the conquistador, and not the inappropriate appropriation, the longing is not the colonist, and when i surrender, i am not colonized, i am born here, this is the night where i am born here, on the edges of this equinox, with fallen victims and falling fathers and mothers whose hearts are relentless and exhausted. i'm making things, and i'm not letting you become the muse this time, but i'll let the muses lead me forward, because they infected me through the veins every time i fell in love. i'm not looking for your twin or your distant cousin, because your incarnation is the first of its kind, and keeping my house in order will keep things warm, prepared for another night of sweating deep in the desert, my throat intact, and my blood running like a river, taking aim like an archer, for the moment when i can speak without stammering, and without regretting a single thing we never said.
a short man in a hat gives me hope for the place i live, and troy davis leaving the world gives me doubt and too much sadness for that same world. but not so much the city, which is also different than yesterday. tonight i want to sweat on september nights in phoenix, i want to sweat next to the steroid drunks who bumped my little girl (they didn't know, they didn't understand, we were there with fucking helmets, this is not supposed to be a war, but we are clearly in a war, class and race and gender warfare, and everyone i love has something at stake). i want to be sweating in phoenix right now, loving and working and making art with these people. there's hope here, and some of the ones who have given up hope are doing very interesting things with their time.
but listen, i am terribly choked up tonight, and it's hard to see as straight as i would like. and i keep getting reminded that my eyes are so much worse than they were at the beginning of the year...i have the eyes of the father (and i don't mean dad)...but that dad, the biological one, is where i start to stammer and can't speak as well as i think i should. these things come back, and while there are things that can be done, the same lightning that flashes through my tongue flashes through the surgical steel and i hope it can surge through his body without taking it off the surface of the waking world. i am too tired to want to think about the things that he gave me when i was the child on the couch when he was trying to take away the pain on so many sleepless nights. children are sleepless in my family, and when we are adults, our hearts are anxious, and they twitch and murmur, and it always makes me think about lost love.
so tonight i have a stammering stuttering song that can't quite make it to my lips, like the bird in my throat is too fluttery to make a clear sound, so it just sounds like this.
bells come to wake me up, nothing better than waking up to a bell that comes, and the sweetest bell in the world is a bell, is still a bell, and all these miles have done nothing to erase that cool silver lightning love that flowed and flowered in my veins when i was captured into knowing you.
tonight i can see that there are more mountains and more rain, and more stories to sing about the things that happen on the floor of the desert and on the stairwell at the lips of the sea, and it doesn't matter how much i put my anxious heart on my altars and ask it to stop singing about you, it doesn't stop singing. and it shouldn't make me choke as much as it does when the cards tell me clearly that you're still there in the center, that you never did leave the home that i built for you there, and there's a fire that still burns.
and it burns my veins, and it burns my skin, and it burns my eyes until everything small becomes blurry, and the larger details are all that i can really focus on. i am all forest and no trees, but i do know that when i enter into new forests, i do get lost there, and i like being lost, because my heart knows where to go.
this is a song about lost love, about losing something i can't ever really lose, and finding things, small traces of things that i want to know. let the fire in my veins guide me, then, since no external gods will show me how to leave with any kind of grace, or hyper-phallogocentric finality, let the things that burn in me take me forward and move me through the world like a machine that knows the channels of these concrete rivers that line the floor of my sweat-soaked home. this is where european and latin and native bloods have to either fight or mix, and on some nights, a bit of both is how we learn to invent a fiercely local tango, one that dances around the home in our heart. the endless longing is not the conquistador, and not the inappropriate appropriation, the longing is not the colonist, and when i surrender, i am not colonized, i am born here, this is the night where i am born here, on the edges of this equinox, with fallen victims and falling fathers and mothers whose hearts are relentless and exhausted. i'm making things, and i'm not letting you become the muse this time, but i'll let the muses lead me forward, because they infected me through the veins every time i fell in love. i'm not looking for your twin or your distant cousin, because your incarnation is the first of its kind, and keeping my house in order will keep things warm, prepared for another night of sweating deep in the desert, my throat intact, and my blood running like a river, taking aim like an archer, for the moment when i can speak without stammering, and without regretting a single thing we never said.
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