Thanks for the Love

There's a whole wide world out there of songs and dances, and pretty little paper things...and absolutely none of it compares to watching someone - two people - finding, falling, finessing in front of your eyes.


The touched foreheads look in two lover's eyes when they, they dance engulfed in each other - and suddenly, the woman throws back her head and laughs - and the man he grins to one-side, (the side reserved only for her)...and they seem frozen in that silenced motion of mystery - and then they sigh and pull back together. And on they dance,,,,and on life goes around, in circles abounding outward... from the origin of just a laugh, just a kiss...just another beginning. 
It's just one moment; in a night in a bar somewhere.


Today, I found myself sipping hot tea across from a face so familiar, so sweet and so evermore regal - and I could see the look in her eyes when she spoke his name. It started, it changed- in just one night in one bar, and one moment.
And I could see the way she was happy, and the way she'd done it right after catastrophe, and the way she was walking down that road that I - I only every once in awhile remember....
And it was all I could ever hope to have of love. 
All I'll ever ask of love - is for my friends to have it, 
for my loved ones to feel it, for all the exhibitionist days long gone to still be baked in it. 


Cause all the world does quake,
and everything,
everything sometimes does wake hurting....and I'm just making a career out of memorializing it; bleeding out the gory parts in ink, and letters, and paper things...to never completely compare to what it's like when everyone around you is smiling for a moment.
Raise up those hands, jump-jump, and on the night does go... as we're all dressed up, drinking champagne and laughing, and something is ticking in the distance...


Here it is now, dear nation-wide family of mine - that stretches on in starless skies and amazing ways - the times when we're making it. 
I promised long ago that'd be just enough. 
It's just enough for me. 

So it doesn't matter where we go. It doesn't matter what we call it, what they call of us, what's calling to us on the drive home.  It's just one night in one bar, and one moment.
Great nights do end (and then we wake up), great loves do live, great friends do move.
But today is just enough.
It's just enough for me to know all of that is out there in the airplane miles of my heart, my mind, my city.


So allow for a sigh, - and clutch the ones you love -when the cold wind blows, and the candles burn over the bountiful table, and the seasons change. That's family.





Happy Thanksgiving! 
Daily headphones: Bruno Mars' "Just the Way Your Are"

Just Wednesday

It's in the way...

The air feels in this city in the morning. When I'm walking to work - haven't had a proper sleep in days, haven't stopped for even a moment, haven't given in - as the air feels hard as grey slate with precipitation waiting to fall, with all my wool and leather layers easing into the burn of a red Starbucks cup and the wind pushing back curls for me.

Sniffle.

The light turns white, and for a moment - treasured moment of routine, I see miles down a 6-lane wide road into the depth of the city. All the blue glass, and the premature Christmas lights fluttering to Off in the dim morning light.

It's all those ways...

That we take at street corners and CTA steps underground, to lurch and hurdle and speeeeed high above the city.

So I took the wrong line the other night, just to dart off and switch trains - and see - raised on the wooden landing - all the blue lights of Chicago.

Sniffle.

Kept staring left and knew home was right inside of there. This month's rent paid, and that's my home-behind that building there-with the empty cupboards and carpet memories. Way over there, so high and soaring uncomfortably bright above the South Side.....what's this life?

What's this....think it's - dare I quote - "worship"? Worship of the streets, of the building pinnacles, of the grind, of the reaching hours, of the gravel nights, of the shapes around trickery and Stage, of the midnight oil oozing and sliding down our foolish, stupid, beautiful backs.......whoa, Pull it back. The clocking in. The clocking out. The contracts, the emails, the this-that "can you do me a favor?", "When could you have it by?", "I need something..."

Don't we all. 

Headphones: Kings of Leon's "Birthday", "The End", Paolo Nutini's "Pencil Full of Lead"

Peace and Tragedy

I clutched my skin, and I dreamed the other night that they laid me in a wooden canoe. The inside of it was curved to a desolate forced mold, and a thousand dents filled all the sides, and all the bottom.....like a thousand migraines, like a thousand hammer-head dents that form a wooden Cabin in The Woods - the very planks of a carcass,....far from the true and beautiful thing it comes to symbolize vaguely.
Vaguely, there in the canoe I was loosing all my memories.

The heavy and white embroidered sheath they'd laid me in was the only thing my fingers could touch, and feel - though the knobbed dents dug into my back and my elbows. It all only just ached a long time ago, past the fence of knowing when..

Couldn't speak, couldn't dare move - it was so quiet. 
I blinked though, -- heavy and slow, in the chilled and humid mist all around.
And just then, their hands slid the Viking canoe over glassy pebbles and out...-into the lagoon leading to the ocean.With the gentle heave the pungent flowers tucked around me bent their heads and easeddd. 

And I was drifting, I knew that, but everything was so calm and so slow.


So what was it that was slidingg awayy in the smallll wake of the canoe?
It was sliding past me on the other sides of my encasement, wiping clean my heavy head somehow.
Erasing the origin of what might have been-faith?, life?, and...Erasing...Erasing all the time...
And I was letting it...I was letting it...
I was farther and farther....away........and I couldn't remember the meaning of so many cherished words.

'Many words....many words...
......The current underneath picked up. And I rocked laterally as the dark wind 'spun round overhead.
And the rocking
turned to shaking,
shaking,...
'Many words...many words...
the shaking,
the shaking...
SHAKING....
AND SHAKING...

and BAM! a sudden lurch spun the entire tomb with such force that the heads of flowers were scattered far across the water's surface.
And I plummeted into icy green water with such a clean swoosh 
of waves
and gasp
and fabric
and up-stretched arms, and long curls,
that it felt....effortless.

But I felt the piercing water and the algea all around. Felt IT hurling back to me.



(And I woke, I guess)
The alarm clock beamed a putrid-orange time, in the silvery-grey light shining through the apartment. Cars honked outside, in the heaves of the city's dawn.
The sheets were warm, and soft, so I eased back in...


Citation: Top image: Grimshaw
Daily headphones: Matt White's "Too Many Lover's", Paolo Nutini's "Still Crazy", Florence&the Machine's "Girl With One Eye" and Rihanna's "Only Girl"