4/30/25: skinny love

Today’s prompt. Thank you to everyone who has read my work all month (especially to the people I bombard with it on a DAILY BASIS.) I'm sorry to see April go, but stayed tuned…I’ve actually got something significant in the works that I'll announce soon.

I’ll never forget where I was the first time I heard it.

Who I was. Might be. That sense of displacement. In a conversation with one of my roommates, as we watched the end of childhood through an obscured glass. I had to hear it. He was insistent. Watch as his eyes light up with splendor as he shared this song with me. 

My my my, my…my

That feeling, fleeting. furtive. the sense that every second was trying to hold water in my bare, shaking hands. Holding it at the end of a cold winter. Trying to take in the sun. Trying to keep it for myself a little longer.

Skinny love. 

Song of youth. Song of sadness. The spare guitar jangling out and on itself. Furtive baritone. I’d never felt so seen while falling. I was sure of a nosedive. Unsure of what would be born from the collision.

Later still, watching my roommate dancing with a friend, singing along, joy in the moment funneling out from the oration of a song. It was a week from the hard stop. 

I spent some corona and Budweiser tears, it was hard to let it these movements go. Hard to see me where I’d end up. Wondering what was left for me afterwards. Wondering what I had to show for my efforts.

All your Love was wasted.

A lifetime later. I only visit this song, none of the others. This line, anthemic before. I realized the mistake: Love being wasted, gone. 

Love isn’t oil. It isn’t youth. It isn’t a pie graph or a timeline. 

It is clean energy. When we use it, it fuels itself. It isn’t a shriveled, weak thing withering in on itself.

I’m still in that moment, hearing this the first time. Hearing it soundtrack life’s interruptions. Between the goodbyes. In our waning, in the winding down. In absence and reunion and the spaces where life carries us.

It wasn’t wasted. It echoes between our souls.

It’s still here. always 

4/28/25: ah, yes, continue

 today's prompt. In honor of the concept of music, I'm going to recommend you listen something you didn't understand the last time you heard it.

music be, miscellaneous
and left for the scavengers.
they're playing the scraps of
songs my brain makes at the

end of dreams. no one knows 
me like you. no one, makes misfired
synapse become the sounds of 
distant symphony, played from a

cave. they didn't know the occasion.
they didn't get the sheet music in 

time. wholesale invention. hardly
heard from the trucks going by, the

hum of progress follows its own,
distinct meter, notation, etc. improvising

as they see fit. the woodwinds against a 
drum. the saxophone with a slide. the stuff

of another time. another nightmare.
another reason to shake our collective
skulls in disdain and rattle our brains
just so. enough to feel it again.

4/20/25: more music and tom foolery

Today's prompt and a poem by Frank O'Hara

ding ding ding!
another correct[able] response
made light from bells and gongs
and the sharp spanking of a triangle.

all right, angles
mangled into the least manageable
botanical manacles, poetry is made through
a series of tubes and my own [happy] nonsense

suspense, suspend the disbelief. more horns to
the concoction. more cons to the hob-nobbery.
more nobs to the conned snobbery. shellacked 
settlements. what good sense won't admit, that little
is kismet.

cleansed and made with the alms i've provided
to make amends. so much depends...you've heard
this before, haven't you? 

unburdened by my truth-telling. salt smellings:
the vapors hit the captive audience. we're waking 
them up. they won't miss a minute of this
performance. this, my comeuppance. this, their
limited engagement. our mutual and
casual estrangement. we've failed to contain it and
now it's got the run of the place.

i should have known this is what we make of it-
this, my inheritance- squandered and dashed against
the breakwater as the boats look on. some sad, some 
indifferent, some seeking vengeance. we are all the boats
and the rocks, maybe even whatever was mine that
hit the rocks and was smashed into tiny water-soluble 
pieces. we are seeing, knowing, dying, growing, fleeing,
crying, lesser poems, indifferent, significant, and none 
of us has really learned anything from this entire enterprise.

the symphony sells itself. we take a bow. thank you for joining.
donations are always demanded, rarely enforced. drive safe.

 

4/16/25: song of thyself or something

Today's prompt. I'm going to share this poem by Victoria Chang.

every footfall is the sound of timpani, rolling along, 
almost an announcement, crescendo and build

to nothing. really. the leaves let the leaves go;
they aren't coming back. really.

the sterile backdrop. clean, uniform brick buildings.
the echo of everyday living. really. minor revelations from
speakers with bit parts. brain rot and rot stew, counter
melody with a song for whoever is. really. listening

that sun, hazed out in his own success, he might be
the maestro. he might be the audience. really. who are
we doing this for, anyway? coming and going, spewing
staccato sticking points and molasses-tinged motifs. really.

incidental jazz. this might be magic. "honk if you hear me."

feel that grit in the back of the throat. really. smog's bounty.
horns letting loose. be free. grumble and step and grumble
and repeat. the sheet music calls for. really. such actions.

follow along. soon we are all instruments. really. enough
doubt. set voice to air, watch it melt into a symphony.
let it slur and detach itself from meaning. let the music
grip our spirits. we are held in its sway. really 

4/1/25: Sinfonia

Day 1 of Napowrimo. Here is the prompt. The term I chose was Sinfonia, defined as "Sinfonia (Italian: symphony) in earlier usage indicated a passage or piece of instrumental music, sometimes an introductory piece; it led to the Italian overture, known as the ‘sinfonia before the opera’: the origin of the Italian symphony."

little did we know it. these happy accidents, delightful breadcrumbs of a familiar shape and acceptable taste, were part and parcel for a new movement. heir apparent to a symphony, our symphony. taking up our instruments like metal in arthurian legends-like gun powder in the unsettled west-like fire for the malcontents. swirl and twist-our notes pirouette and bound and fall and screech, beautiful and uninhibited, noble-feral. what began as misfires, errant notes askew on the sheet music, the cough of an uneasy patron of the arts shifting his mass on the metal folding chair, takes beautiful shape-and in slow, uncertain steps- becomes a movement.