It should be fairly safe typing, sure I have open bottle of poison (nicotine juice) on the desk, but hell, I’m old timber right? What could possibly go wrong? You know what the Violent Femmes and Pablo Neruda have in common? They wrote great things about love, but you can’t quote em to a girlfriend.
With Neruda if you go far enough something dies or sad happens, with the femmes something crude or out of context happens. It’s twenty fourteen and even my generation expect the femmes and not Neruda, so I’ll give you an example of even the closest sort of quotable/do not quote femmes;
I’m going on the knowledge that I have been burned
I’m learning things that I should have already learned
Everyone I knew was so kind and coy
I was with a girl but it felt like I was with a boy
I can’t even remember if we were lovers or if I just wanted to
I held her in my arms, I held her in my arms
I held her in my arms but it wasn’t you
And Neruda, well, shit there’s a zillion examples let me find one, hang on;
You know how this is;
If I look At the crystal moon, at the red branch
Of slow autumn at the window
If I touch near the fire
The impalpable ash
Or the wrinkled body of the log
Everything carries me to you
Which yeah is romantic (the stanza carries on with lush images and sweet sentiment) but the next stanza is
Well, Now,
If little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you, little by little.
And sure, you would want to play the song or read the poem to a lover, but you don’t want to court one with either. Or you do, I don’t know exactly. Sometimes the whole democratic process, at least how it plays out in the states, is a bit like a courtship; everyone is on their best behavior or demonstrating the competitions worst behavior, but ultimately the country picks a lover they know will disappoint them in less than four years.
Maybe we need campaign slogans like If little by little you stop loving me I shall stop loving you, little by little. We sure as hell need em like I was with a girl but it felt like I was with a boy. I guess it depends on where you’re going and why. And yeah, no point in being dishonest if you’re looking for love, but of the millions of sounds and poems I like I could avoid those two without being dishonest, I mean neither are the top of my list of anything.
Just saying they probably aren’t great for wooing. I know jack shit about wooing. Yeah, that’s right, I know so little I’ve given the shit I know a name, jack. I don’t know why Jack shit is an emphatic negative and shit is neutral (leaning heavily towards not positive). If I were to continue listing what I don’t know I’d hit that window pane of stuff I don’t even know that I don’t know. Today I would sever a nerve with the glass from a metaphorical window pane.
Despite the surfeit of jack shit in my romantic knowledge base I am, just the same, rather blessed or, you know, cursed. Just saying I have a hot tap and a cold tap and no matter how I try (assuming I would) I can’t make tepid. I have had great love and had great love turn to shit or blossom or die. Romantically it mostly turns to shit, eventually. I’m ever the optimist and this time around I think I’ve learned, unlikely, but I think I’ve been unusually blessed. She is who the refrain is for --- (I held her in my arms) but it wasn’t you.
Ah, I have a few things on my desk that aren’t poison, among them a duduk reed. My own stiff limb therapy, the bass duduk takes some dexterity, a stretching of fingers, a steadiness of breath, a strong purpose to the lips. The instrument is so far removed from other things I’ve played the tinny voice of a music teacher long gone isn’t whispering to me about proper ombochure . If I close my eyes and forget everything except for my sense of hearing it’s like I have created from the air a new beast, passionate if, perhaps, a bit melancholia in it’s song of itself, it’s the nature of the sound, the duduk cries melancholy, the sax growls bump and grind, the clarinet swings, the trumpet calls to duty, the cello weeps.
It’s the key, or it’s my key, block out all the things you know and all the things you don’t know, and recreate the world with a narrow focus, follow that thin line and what you seek is at the end, or, more often than not something better, something you didn’t even know you were seeking.
No, I am not stoned. Yes I probably should be. At least I didn’t go all;
A poem in February
It was my fifty fourth year to heaven
And I woke dead wood and the crow preisted wires
And drifts piled high against the fence …
A
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