Saturday, October 16, 2021

A Message to the Serious Young Artist

First, you'll be tested

to a point where it will

be tempting to give up.

This will happen many times.


Nobody has an obligation

to push through,

but if you believe you are

the real thing,

you just will

even when you don't want to.


This is how you discover

who you really are.


This is when you have to use

the very skill you claim to possess

to weave a world in which

you are among the very best.


This is not done with words

or even with external achievements.


This is done in secret,

over time.

It is done in the details

that you spy

which others overlook

but are precious and important.


You who see the game

the wide lens unframed

depth of the whole thing,


you are the one

who disturbs the force around you,

yes.

Your energy might effervesce

your way might confess

what you've seen

who you've been

who you are,

therein is the test.


Can you endure

the spellbinding poetry

magnetic to the vagrant eye?

It tells tales of all parts of you,

these are the voices from which we shy away.

But they that seem to beam

from within you

and into others around you,

as if reading, as it were,

between the lines;

what is that text, exactly,

which is written in actions

giving a metaphysics

to our hearts and our minds?


Might that not be

the eternal poetry of time?

Something endless,

in your chest and mine?

Whilst I rhyme and write lines

you solve some other predicament

happening now, in our time,

and so we are the same,

at service to life

and each other

in our own way.


Can you endure

the loneliness

the vague psychosis

the alienation of a world of folk

who think they'll call

you're bullshit?


Are you so sure,

is ultimately the question.


Are you so sure

of your intent,

that it is indeed divine?


Do you have the courage

to look into a dubious eye

and speak your whole

complex truth

in a glance or a smile?


Did you hear the laws spoken?

did you ever walk alongside lightning?


Did the pigs fork you

like animals at a formal dinner?


Did the great minds of each time

each era,

did they sound like family

of some other sort?


Did you think that maybe

things could be different

that you had and have the answer

with no way to deliver it?


Did you dream big and feel a fool?

Did they laugh at you

and energize your ego

and make you better

with their ugly, shitty love?


Did you learn to love them, too;

those haters, losers,

those liars afraid of their truth?


If you didn't,

you are not you.


You are some version of them,

a shade of gray behind the wind,

of a storm that always comes

and says it is innocent.


And that is okay, too.


An artist is one who

breaks himself

to be true

(not to know the truth).

He may never express it

as we egoic do

(writing and painting and dancing and song)

but if he does it

that deep work

where the gears of infinity lock

and work their magic into life

then he has made art

and he will be art

because courage to be true

and being it, through and through,

is to be nearest to your essence

that of God's light.



Friday, October 15, 2021

A Frontman's Woes

I miss you, stage
I miss you, audience, energy, madness
drunk fans in the front giving me swigs
offering me tokes
I miss you, lovely night trips
through mountains and highways
at night.
To big cities, to small squares
in the center of small Sierra towns,
I miss you, music,
I am sorry that I was made
like this:
not a banker, not a lawyer, not a salesman,
not a businessman.
I am just a performer,
out of work,
who has tried to deny to himself
how much he loved it,
those nights,
your glow and sweat and laughter,
oh, what it was to love thousands at a time.