As a man I am inspired....

Post by **Arcadia** » July 16th, 2007, 6:18 pm

I´m crossing the border again!! Jorge Drexler "Mi guitarra y vos". He´s sweet and a bit zen!!. (not a good video..)
(I´ll try to re-post the link later, it seems it doesn´t work)

Totenkopf · Post by **Totenkopf** » July 19th, 2007, 12:15 am

Post by **stilltrucking** » July 22nd, 2007, 6:39 am

Loving Her Was Easier...
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Totenkopf · Post by **Totenkopf** » July 22nd, 2007, 10:50 pm

Post by **YABYUM** » July 24th, 2007, 7:51 am

though the reason was lost long ago as to a why this topic began....
i am now inspired to have the possibility of reaching one thousand views. so here is not mine........

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Post by **stilltrucking** » July 24th, 2007, 4:46 pm

Poetry is frustrating, inscrutable, convoluted. And it might just save your life.
The first morning I walked my youngest son to kindergarten the soft sun cut his hair into shards of lit hay. Our arms swung in unison, big hand leading small, and I heard his book bag thwack his back twice for every step I took. I thought I would feel free, would feel the sky dive beneath me, lift me above the school. I wanted to leap into career, be something Big, someone Big, Important, be a damn Big Shot.

If you had asked me that moment anything about poetry I would have laughed, would have remembered my eleventh grade teacher, the one with the black leather jacket and perpetual sneer. Mr. Adamski ruled the room with seventies hip, with well-timed cuss words and the scent of clove cigarettes wafting around careful words.

"Ladies and gents," he'd say. "Open your fucking poetry book."

The class tittered, flinched. More than one of us checked the closed door to be sure the Vice Principal wasn't scouring the halls with his brillo pad attitude.

"Turn to page 51. Let's recite."

We'd punch out vowels that Plath once held, consonants from Ginsberg's pocket, yell stanza after stanza into the stale air. I loved it, loved the bounce of my voice against the others', the way Mr. Adamski leaned back in his wooden chair, booted feet secure on desk, his eyes closed in rapture as if our chants brought him closer to that good rolled hash he enjoyed after hours.

Most poems didn't make sense to me. The smart kids got it, could chat with Teach about hidden metaphor, about Plath's suicidal angst. I sat in back with the potheads, with the shop-class crowd, a scuffed home ec book under my seat instead of the Latin texts the front-seaters carried.

I love these sounds. I love these sounds.

I remember reciting this mantra, remember trying to pry something other than ear candy from the exercise. Nothing else ever came. The day I quit school, the day I ran from home, the day I discovered I was, I couldn't be, pregnant, the day my mom and dad didn't notice my bed kept lonely watch. I tossed my poetry book into my neighbor's thick hedge. A corner stuck out as if to say Hey! Don't leave me! You need me! but I kicked it deep into the mess of prickly leaves.

Take that, stupid smart kids! Take that! I don't understand you! I hate you! I hate poetry! I hate it! It's only for smart kids and I'm not one of them! Everything is for smart kids! I hate school! I don't want a baby! No one loves me anyway!

I didn't stop running, hitching, crying, until a kind old coal miner left me on a Seattle sidewalk, three thousand miles from that poetry book, a ragged twenty in my hand. I stood in line at the employment assistance office day after day, filled out form after form, met with pasty faced placement officers and nothing, just nothing happened. I walked the parking lot looking for spare pennies, for thirty-one cents, exactly enough to buy a loaf of cheap bread.

I wrote a poem that Thanksgiving. I sat on the deck of a shoddy apartment on the banks of the Nisqually river, back against the wall, frozen, tired, swollen. I don't know what possessed me to take a pencil and mark the occasion on the back of a grocery receipt, but I did. I stuck it in my wallet. I keep it with me to this day.

Nisqually
The water is so black and cold
it swirls with native fish, chum with pink tails and monsoon eyes
they sneak through mirror water and want to leave me a message
but I can't hear them
my ears are full, just like my belly
the grasses below the water collect the message
let it sink to the silt
sink to mud silt

The day after I first walked my youngest son to kindergarten, I knew I was no potential Big Shot. My bills sat in a messy pile on the edge of the kitchen counter. I couldn't pay them. I collected welfare. I paid for eggs and milk with the swipe of my food stamp card. The day I shoved book into briar was the last day I sat in a classroom.

There's gotta be a better way. I hate living like this. I hate the sun, this perpetual arc of harsh photons that never slows. It always looks like summer here, even when my heart is dead. It's been so many years since living on the Nisqually. Life just gets more difficult. It doesn't surrender. I've had no time, no money, no help to attend school. I can only do what I can do.

I remember thinking this thought. I didn't know it was poetry, it was the same as writing words on a dirty page. I didn't know. I paid ten dollars to Avon, got a beginner's bag, ten brochures, two boxes of samples. I trudged through canyon, met educated yuppie in need of beauty, met homeless Latino men who labored long hours in the strawberry fields. I think it was a stretch of upturned earth, a man, a sad man with arms filled with heavy equipment, his brow coated in dirt-crusted sweat, who cracked my two-decade veneer.

This is poetry. This is what Mr. Adamski and Plath tried to tell me. This meager existence, this man surrounded by manure. He is poetry. It isn't a gift for the smart. It's a gift of breath, of air through our pores. Poetry. It's the way I see this world. It's the pain of my Washington State. It's the joy of my youngest son's first day of school. The way he runs, dammit, the way he runs across that clover-laded school yard. Poetry.

It doesn't have to make sense. The words, the sounds can be enough. I can be poor like I am today, be poor and uneducated, a woman pushing forty with failed relationships and no money. Poetry still belongs to me. I can read it, even when I don't understand it. I can love the sound, the scrape of my tongue against palate. I can write it. I get it.

http://blogher.org/node/14730

Post by **stilltrucking** » August 15th, 2007, 3:07 pm

a thousand views?
I should have quit while I was behind.
what's this 1522?

this is inspiring me today

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Post by **Arcadia** » August 15th, 2007, 9:04 pm

rock & roll and icecreams!!! nice after a Said-Todorov-Chateaubriand class!! (I´m drinking a Warsteiner and eating jam and cheese now!)

Post by **stilltrucking** » September 4th, 2007, 11:16 pm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvBlKcyfeoU

Thanks bennie 2

JMC and Something was a nice juxtoposition

Just what I needed to hear tonight

Hard for me to get my head around the past twenty seven years. So far removed from women. It was so hard to leave her because I did not need no other women. But it was a hard lesson for me to learn the difference between me still needing her and trying to cling to her when she did not need me anymore. I should have rode off into the sunset. In the end she was the one that had to ride off to the far northwest. Just as far as she could get from me.
Dang me I still wish they all could be California girls.

"lover's who promise forever
speak mindless of time's constant prowl" jitterbug

Post by **stilltrucking** » September 6th, 2007, 11:00 am

Rose In Paradise Ole Waylon

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Totenkopf · Post by **Totenkopf** » November 15th, 2007, 4:24 pm

Post by **stilltrucking** » November 16th, 2007, 2:19 pm

Post by **YABYUM** » December 7th, 2007, 7:11 am

Post by **tinkerjack** » December 17th, 2007, 10:41 am

Post by **YABYUM** » January 20th, 2008, 4:56 am

these lyrics are burning me.....

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Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

As a man I am inspired....

..

so ....piano and beauty?

...

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