February 28, 2008
Posted by david in Musings.add a comment
i wonder how much of literature is: man recreating a world that he has become disenchanted with.
the muscles of a crying man February 25, 2008
Posted by david in Creative Non-Fiction, Poetry.1 comment so far
David wants to run away.
maybe david is a little boy,
and maybe,
he is confused.
maybe he might find something buried in the woods. underneath a thick, green, and shady silence, he might find a play. falling out of an elderly balsam tree; an old play, with tattered pages and a good title.
maybe david is afraid; ashamed.
maybe david has made some mistakes.
.
maybe david will go on. telling people that he made the shape of a bonfire in their coffee’s bubles, or a picture of their grandmother with the crème fresh that tops their soup.
maybe he has lost something that was something.
.
maybe he is not a little boy, david, who wants to run away. maybe he is that prophet of the old testament, who, walked over men with his sword
and then washed his hands of their blood.
who called down fire from heaven and turned away as it shattered the stones
and burned a divine glow onto the face of the ticket-holders
turned sons.
.
that prophet
is not a little boy, he has big muscles and dark pools for eyes –
in all the sunday school posters.
his cloak is made of rough cloth, that is, until it reaches his apprentice, with a softer name, and thus a softer picture drawn for the little children
with clean faces.
.
that prophet is not a little boy, but he ran like one,
away from the girl that stuck out her tongue at him, and pulled his hair.
have i just offended you?
and your old testament hero
turned pants-wetting child?
he is, though, me,
maybe.
a man without big muscles, as the artists would believe.
but a man who, at one time, had
faith the size of a
mustard seed.
now,
with no face,
covered,
weeping for the sake of a whisper.
hopeing for
a
moving on,
a
making good
on his
jelousy.
an epigraph to: ‘the muscles of a crying man’ February 25, 2008
Posted by david in Poetry.add a comment
::: my epigraph to the facebook status, i’m kinda into epigraphs lately :::
Golden rod and the 4-H stone
The things I brought you
When I found out you had cancer of the boneYour father cried on the telephone
And he drove his car to the Navy yard
Just to prove that he was sorry
In the morning through the window shade
When the light pressed up against your shoulder blade
I could see what you were reading
Oh the glory that the lord has made
And the complications you could do without
When I kissed you on the mouth
Tuesday night at the bible study
We lift our hands and pray over your body
But nothing ever happens
I remember at Michael’s house
In the living room when you kissed my neck
And I almost touched your blouse
In the morning at the top of the stairs
When your father found out what we did that night
And you told me you were scared
Oh the glory when you ran outside
With your shirt tucked in and your shoes untied
And you told me not to follow you
Sunday night when I cleaned the house
I find the card where you wrote it out
With the pictures of your mother
On the floor at the great divide
With my shirt tucked in and my shoes untied
I am crying in the bathroom
In the morning when you finally go
And the nurse runs in with her head hung low
And the cardinal hits the window
In the morning in the winter shade
On the first of March on the holiday
I thought I saw you breathing
Oh the glory that the lord has made
And the complications when I see his face
In the morning in the window
Oh the glory when he took our place
But he took my shoulders and he shook my face
And he takes and he takes and he takes
the 4th conversation February 21, 2008
Posted by david in Musings, Original Music.1 comment so far
::disclaimer: if you don’t know that ‘julia’ is my guitar, you might get a little confused::
::
i thought it right to finish what i started.
i began last week with an intemperate description of my intemperate mind as i struggled to complete an essay on things fall apart by chinua achebe. i believe this was the first book that i ever read twice. the book was: powerful, beautiful, purposeful and original — everything that my essay was not. thus, i had a conversation with sheryllee, my publishing partner, as i frantically searched for a muse in my life’s madness;
my pierides hiding in the lumpy pasture of my mind.
i let you, my readership, travel with me on this journey of writing an essay – four conversations, all containing a music video. hawksely workman to sufjan stevens to new buffalo and now david cairns. yet the piece of music and accompanying video might need some explanation.
::
i had an epic week. on tuesday i went to see matt costa and delta spirit at the starlite room. both acts were extremely good and the show finished around midnight. since i had been writing in circles for the past few days, when i arrived at home i decided to continue my weariness. this writing came hard at first, but by five in the morning the words were pouring out of me in torrents of genius. i lie – well, just the last line. no torrents of genius ever came.
it was a gritty boxing match. sticky blood and salty sweat covering the titans, as they battle for hours, in the name of vainity.
the final essay was not overly powerful, but thick with tension. not unspeakably beautiful but attractive by adventure. not purposeful, no, not at all – but it was original. it was a battle field and after a night of toil…here comes the sun.
the sun coming up on the end of the calamity, no remeinance of pure redemption, none. only the physical glimmer of the morning sun on the green parts of the grass that make us wonder about some moving on.
i came to this fairytaleish-civil-war-sunrise after a i had hammered out a solid draft. i then picked up my julia and decided to let her weigh in on the morning.
so there we were: me, julia, sheryllee, and God in the morning.
julia’s voice filled the basement as the essay lay on the table, and after many hours of correcting and editing i would hand it into my teacher the next day.
::
also included in my epic week was me, running out of groceries and eating pierogis for three meals in a row. just pierogis. did i mention that i didn’t sleep for about 40 hours straight, due to the fact that i decided to go to school after staying up all night? but after stumbling my way from february 11th to 15th, i loaded a irresponsibly packed bag into 1993 toyota carolla and headed for the mountains, which are an essay from God (if you will accept it): powerful, beautiful, purposeful and original.
in His essay i glimpse an end to such calamity and the beggining of a pure redemption.
::just in case your wondering about the music, its only julia, one time. she is just that beautiful, and if i could actually speak to her more properly, that symphony you hear behind her, might be a little more orderly. a little less ‘drunken men in tuxedos shammering symbols together at the wrong times and their tangy bows bearing down on mediocre chords’. but the music’s undercurrent is laced with some notes of shear brilliance, rising up on sturdy legs…finding their begining deep in julia’s sides::
update on my essay: i’m thinking that no one cares — still February 12, 2008
Posted by david in Musings.1 comment so far
well, i wanted to update you with a music video, but unfortunately there is so much debauchery in music video’s today, thus all my desired video’s were not fit for the toffee tree. thus i leave you with this nice video, a happy video
the gyre; hopefully narrowing February 12, 2008
Posted by david in Musings.add a comment
well, to keep you updated on things no one cares about, the essay is one huge mixed metaphor — that is showing some potentail.
a conversation with my full partner in ‘electric heart co. publishers’: a musing with sheryllee about my lost pierides February 11, 2008
Posted by david in Musings.1 comment so far
::a diologue::
well, sheryllee, i’m sitting here unable to write and i didn’t know who to turn to. and who better, i thought, than my esteemed partner in the writing business.
our publishing company has been through many ups and downs. posts that bubble over with laughter and humor, surly blogs, and the mask of the emo-poet we have adorned oft. and the critics, oh the fickle critics! papers marked with an ugly D+. looking back, even though the paper was put together very poorly, i think that part of the reason it received the crude grade was the simple fact that people were not ready for me to equate the protagonist’s loss of identity with her envisioned mercurial face of God. just not ready.
well, the paper is due to the critics on thursday, sheryllee, and i don’t want to shame our wonderful company with another D.
we can’t overlook, however, that the greatest, and most recent, public acclaim of our work that lies on green web page, in a land far away (http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~courses/English/113S1/studentessay1.htm). and you would think that i might build on such a masterpiece of the epic and tainted apostles of imperialism.
you would think.
but i can not build at all, my hands seem so verily misshapen for the surface of the blocks. i stack them up into a great tower, but everything warbles, wables, wavers then falls. and i am left with the a messy fray of blocks, the kind with big capital letters, all of them sporting colourful faces of C, D, and F.
thus i muse with you, about my lack of a muse. mr. nelson once told me that a muse is irreplaceable. that you need to hang on to such. indeed.
(what a ramble i’ve got going, sherylle! what a drunken stupor! a right, drunken pen to draw right, drunken lines!)
let me try to get back to some form of sanity…great writing is, they say, a only good forms of re-writing. but the thing this school seems to not understand is inspiration. one may only re-write something he has originally written out of inspiration. conrad wrote heart of darkness partly because of the visions of languid oily seas and gausey sunsets that danced behind his eyes. in the same way, achebe faced with the richness of the african-ibos was inspired to mark their place in literature with more than the flat, dry, stale words placed in their mouth by conrad. both men stretched out their hands and spread their tragic beauty on the page, better than spread — they poured onto white space with such measure that, upon the reading, the art climbs its way into the readers imagination, vividly present for the years to come.
there is desire in their writing.
what is my inspiration for writing, sheryllee? fear. fear of a D. i am in quite a pickle here.
::a dialogue, remember::
believe.
a music video: i hope the video dosn’t confuse the music February 6, 2008
Posted by david in Musings, Original Music.add a comment
this is a little project of mine. (if you are in the video, you did not inspire this dreary music, i just needed a dark room. your faces shall never make me write a sad song.)
:::if there is not music video above this line, then i’m guess your looking at my ‘facebook notes’. well, here’s a tip, always view the original source, cuz sometimes stuff doesn’t get through the import, and you could be missing out. also i only make corrections or additions to the original posts:::
::warning: from now on, this post may in fact be very, very boring. you don’t have to read it. and this is not a trick to make you read it::
if you kept up with my last post, that was david bazan covering leonard cohen’s infamous ‘hallelujah’. why i was so drawn to the video was because i’ve always loved the song, the poetry, and the kitchen chair, but david bazan played it more powerfully, for me, than cohen ever could have. he took the song and made it distinctively his. what we are not talking about here is ill scarlet ripping off rihanna’s ‘umbrella’. that was good project in its own right, but i think we would always be more prone to call it (as most all covers): ill scarlet covering rihanna’s ‘umbrella’, whereas we can aptly title the former cover: david bazan’s ‘hallelujah’. its about owning what you’ve stolen so perfectly and emphatically, that most believe that the original writer must have stolen it from you. and in some way you are receiving back the torch that he/she had borrowed. so, inspired by such, i embarked a little journey of my own, one that would last me about nine minutes and forty five seconds. i have always had a certain chorus floating around in my head, so i called it a bridge and went to work on a couple of verses and chorus. in my first attempt a spewed out a full song in five minutes. very rare, because even if i sing a full song during the very first writing attempt, it’s usually thirteen or fourteen minutes of playing around before i stop and evaluate what i got. so, rather astonished by this spurt of inspiration i plug my guitar and mic in, and let er rip. what came out is what is on this video. the microphone pops, and i hit one pretty egregious note, but it is what came out. the song is very melancholy. so don’t listen to it too many times. i don’t want to deal with a bunch of angstful comments. for those of you who often admit on how my depressing blogs can scar you (fake mom, are you listening?) – my outlook is not as bleak as the tune. in fact, the truth is, that even though i can relate with the first person persona, the ‘i’ character is actually not me — the ’you’ character is — don’t that just blow yo hill-william mindwhat i find interesting about the song is how in lyrics (written and stolen), music, and tone seem to fold back on themselves into this sort of rational impossible object. the video, containing a few subtle quirks and faces, has really nothing to do with the song, and by no means needs to be paired with the song (like most music videos) to make sense. in fact my greatest fear is that the video will confuse the lyrics, hopefully not. lets title it together: – pressed and stolen: an empty seat on the lonesome piano bench.
perfect! long, ambiguous, and cryptic 
p.s. i wasn’t calling any of my readers hill-billys — its just an expression.
p.s.s. i forgot to give respect to damien rice who wrote the bridge of my song. its found in his own tune named ‘delicate’. interestingly, or perhaps even plunging you deeper into boredom, i think damien is probably one of the most similar artists stylistically to myself, just slanderously more talented. but as lesley (song 5 and 10 on my CD if your paying attention) would point out: damien’s music is like a picture of him standing in front of you, holding out his hands for you to see his raw, pulsating heart. — just like blah! right there. end quote, well maybe i paraphrased.
