Tag Archives: creativity

The Traveller’s Song

Is the thought gone?
Did it dissolve away
like the sudden snowflake
on the tip of a hot tongue?

And the words on the tip of my tongue
Dissolve, but are never destroyed
Piggybacking on the steel legs
of reason and wonder,
exhaustion, joy,
and the foreign wanderer
I have always been.

Not an idle word is abandoned
in the wake of new songs
How they flicker in the sun
turning, keeping time, telling stories
in wordless languages
of colors colliding, instrument strings
vibrating, resonating the songs of our souls

And I was born old
Onward I crawl, by day and year,
Towards the day of my birth:
Rewoven again in trembles and starlight.
I’m going to see Him-
All these years waiting,
traveling alone,
though I never have been.

What was the thought?
The traveler’s cloak
a defense against the cold
wrapped over the bare emotion
breathing beneath
It unravels to expose
the naked beauty

of the forgiven soul’s migration.


Rebel Yell

My morose flows
Like a shallow stream carving,
A waking dream,
A beggar starving,
But there’s a well in me
Swelling waters in the deeps of me
That ripple insurrection
The deepest introspections
Dredge my recklessness:
I won’t let this mess own me
I won’t succumb quietly
Shaking these lies I’ve invented,
I’ve invited in to stay,
And made their bed
I’ve fed them my hours,
My future, my vital powers,
But I’m done, I scour them off my walls
Because all this-
It’s just a distraction
A fraction of my purpose,
And there is a reason I wait,
Why every few seasons
I shake off my possessions,
Reminding me I’m not what I have,
And it doesn’t have me.
I am free
Because of the word He has spoken
I am broken,
And unbreakable

Because He made this knowledge,
This vision, this raging existence
Unshakeable in Himself.
I am who I have,
And He has me.


Bricolage

There is a wildness in me
An ocean in a bottle
With a moist cork, I see
I stand a suppressed model
Of practicality,
Revving for full throttle
But for the wake of brutality
And all forgot, all
Sacrificed to creativity,

But there is something wild in me
And still it grows, and still I thirst
For open fields, and free
Paints, and notes, and words
And time and space to feed
What be the best or worst
Or wildest escapee-
All unheard, and all unversed,
La Pensée Sauvage will be.


Longhand

Spit out something new,
Something you have spewed
In the same old terms.
The linguistic squirm
Fidgets from thought to thought
Nothing is as fresh as it ought
But each day is a new footstep forward
We all move away, we all move toward
We’re all becoming what we rehearse
For better or for worse.


Liberated

My brother slashed his canvases

His scenes of earth in motion

Were layers thick in paint

Every coating represented commotion

So in the tumult of self-condemnation

He succumbed to but one emotion.

 

I dump my words upon my words

Hoping a new layer somehow conceals

The best in me, the worst in me,

The passion I’m ashamed I still feel;

Instead of smothering my inadequacies

Each word finds a new piece of me to reveal.

 

Letting your best go off to greet the day

Requires the skill to forgive

Perhaps there comes a decisive moment

When you have given all you have to give

And you must decide to slash your darlings

Or let them leave to let them live.