Friday, May 29, 2009

On Making Something From Nothing Or How Nothing Is Always Already Something: Sleep Deprived Ramblings For People Who Like To Laugh At Whiplash


I have half a mind to post a blank page here today.
Half a mind to ask you to contemplate the awesomeness 
of emptiness, the way it sparks with potential.
No one has found a way for beginnings to come without 
endings, that's the bad news.
The good news is that every end means a new beginning, 
which means the time is ripe to create.

And that's just what we're doing 
in This Blue Heaven right now. 
It's a germination period.
An underground growth period.
The ground only looks barren.
The page only looks blank.
It's about to bust out some rhymes,  yo.
Cuz that's how we ro'.  
I'm writing lyrics.
I'm learning to write lyrics 
that might could torpedo 
a heart or two.
I didn't make that line up.
A number of years ago someone said that to me 
about music -- it was like a torpedo to her heart -- 
and it changed the way I thought about 
a lot of things, forever.
I hope these songs will torpedo a heart.  
Or two.  
I stole a line from someone's great-grandmother 
and used it in a chorus.
But man was it a good line.  
I could have said it.
I even might have said it if given enough time.  
GP and KP are writing music for these lyrics.
Music with thrust.  
Torpedos are no good sitting inert in a warehouse.
They need someone to sit down with them.
Some people need to sit down with things.
I hope there aren't so many metaphors mixing and
bumping into each other in the new lyrics 
as in this blog entry.
I'll have to check.

Blank pages have no mistakes in them yet.
So there's that, too.
But we must weigh the risk, however 
high, against how hard we may rock.
Okay I stole that line, too.
I love everyone I ever really loved 
when I sit down to write.
I love you is always a quotation.
You did not say it first and neither did I.
That line is rightfully Jeanette Winterson's.
But man is it a good line.
There is nothing new under the sun.
Case in point.
But the juxtapositions, the juxtapositions can be new!
And so can the moon if we give it a little shade.
A little chance to go underground.
Leave the sky to the sly, mysterious stars.
Poe's phrase, man, doesn't it turn good?
I heard it first last night.
Night ends where dawn begins.
Or is it the other way around?
It's all the same f*cking day, man.
Janis Joplin.
It's all good news.
Let the metaphors be bumper cars.
Just buckle up and let 'em.


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