I live haunted with the ghost of a song on my tongue
Like a finger tapping
along the spine of a forgotten book
To a rhythm only kept by the space between the beating of dove’s wings
Sometimes it seems like
the only way to give it a body
Is to run some lightning through random thoughts and empty bottles
Set my heart on fire and hope for the best
or maybe the worst
It all depends on who you ask
As long as they’re not a cop
There exists a place of music, past the needlessly political,
across the melodramatic description
And just around the corner from the existential crisis
And there dances this song,
maybe every song
In a garden before creation
Not waiting, whistling,
but already there
Taken up into the wind’s embrace like so many tumbleweeds and rose petals
Setting down briefly to drink from clear, eternal springs
and being the space between things, sets the beats
before they can be missed
It hums there, true and beautiful
this primordial rhythm tuned to the heartstrings of mankind
Or perhaps us to it
Though that question hangs unasked and answered in the Garden
You can never quite catch the whole tune though, can you?
Try as you might to tap out each step, in time you tread upon yourself or another
and the trance is broken with the snapping of cords
And we think ourselves terribly clever for having tasted an eighth note of paradise
But in the end, that’s all we want right?
Paradise, and to have gotten ourselves there
Stealing sheet-music and carving flutes
Scratching symphonies into cave-walls
But seldom together, too often alone
By our own and same devices
We crave originality, desperately
scrabbling to be something new,
say something novel
all for delusions and sour the notes
If the song is pre-written, musn’t we just accept our roles as ever-shifting, translucent copycats, chasing thoughts and getting our paws stuck in rabbit-holes
or are we constantly composing new harmonies, writing a key to fit the gates of Paradise?
Yet we only ever sing Truth when we lose ourselves in music.
For example: I’m not sure if what I’m writing is true, but I’m also not sure it’s a poem any longer.
I did intend it to be one.
