Sometimes I feel like a black sheep in the white-noise family.
Sometimes cracked mirrors follow me like stray dogs claiming they see something of themselves in me.
Sometimes a train’s outbound whistle is the only music I hear on this side of town.
Sometimes I like to think of dusk as when day’s getting up the nerve to ask evening to dance.
Last night I mistook the moon for the face of a man I used to know while working the graveyard shift at the wishing-well factory.
Death don’t dare bother us here, he’d tell me, just as long as you got a few good dreams tucked away in your back pocket.
He said that dreams, the really good ones, won’t even kick you outta bed for leaving the occasional cookie crumbs of disbelief all over the place.
That man had hands more calloused than malice and a voice like a piano hurled off a rooftop.
But he sure knew how to talk about dreams.
Before clocking out of work, I’d always reach into my back pocket and pull out a good dream.
It was lucky and shiny as the penny I used to balance on the arm of my record player to keep my music from skipping.
Lucky and shiny—some dreams can be that way.
Troubled minds might come easier if there weren’t those voices of sunshine choirs lifting us to a higher place.
Grief might be an easier pill to swallow if we weren’t offered so many air kisses from cool breezes.
If bliss’s whiskey didn’t have a kick like a Rockettes chorus line.
If we didn’t have a stone-cold classic jam for a door jam.
Sometimes hopelessness might fit us better if we didn’t have cheeks that occasionally flush with the color of happily-ever-after.
We’ve walked through fires of failure and futility. Had our psyches burned and berated.
Doubt’s dogs have mauled our most cherished dreams.
We’ve been the ghost stories for the skeletons in our closets. We’ve prayed for light but only received dynamite.
Earthquakes and hurricanes have shaken us. Bureaucracy continually breaks us.
We’ve flirted with miracles but have been screwed by madness.
We’ve been haunted by the past, left hollow when imagining better tomorrows.
Still, we emerge from the flames singed but singing. We are the melodies that refuse to live quietly.
I’ve never got on well with death.
Never really appreciated its in-laws, its suits reeking of mothballs, or how its food always has that aftertaste of grave dirt.
Never really understood death’s tombstone humor or how it’s always getting drunk on moonshine and crank-calling the living at all hours of the night.
But perhaps I got it wrong; maybe death gets a bad rap.
I hear the only thing in its home is a cracked mirror.
If that’s all you’re looking into every day, I’d imagine one can start seeing themselves and the world in strange ways.
When death and I come face-to-face for that final poker game, I’ll ask it what cards it carries up its sleeve.
And how, sooner or later, it always manages to cheat life.
When ghosts touch one another, do they feel anything? Is there an exchange of energy or emotions?
All I know is when we come into this world, we enter it crying but don’t mean to hurt our entire lifetime.
So many small and large dyings before our final dying.
Between it all, the boisterous noise of hubble bubble pop and snap in our sweet human steps.
What once was wounds, now wings. What once was ash, now open air.
I pledge allegiance to the tender country of joy.
I can never manage to find things that fit me right—
one day, a shirt is too big, another day, the pants are too small.
Some days, everything is just so so-so.
While walking in the park with my daughter yesterday, she wore a colorful voice-knitted melody on her lips.
It came to her naturally as breathing.
It wasn’t a song I’d ever heard before; she was making it up on the spot.
It poured sweetly from her being, the sonic manifestation of her at that moment.
As she grows older, I hope she can construct an inner song garden that weathers the darkest moments.
I hope anti-gravity runs through her veins, so falling doesn’t hurt as much.
My daughter continues singing.
Inside the song, outside the song, she wears her melodies well.
Imagine all the north star’s fan letters stacked to the farthest-reaching galaxies and back.
Imagine the countless joyrides we’ve taken on the cosmic darkside, our brave-hearted curiosities born from years of moonage daydreams.
Imagine a chorus of earthly voices refusing to sing a gospel of bombs.
Imagine a world where we can throw a monkey wrench into the genetic coding of generic outcomes.
Imagine how light can be a metaphor for love or a semaphore for when one is lost.
Imagine escaping from beneath the weight that hinders grace.
I hear the morning sun count its gold blessings while waiting for the grass to grow.
I hear last paychecks wheezing their final breath before slipping into empty-pocket memories.
There’s car horns and party horns.
Crazy love doing its levitation act on the lips of Hollywood Hills kisses as the downtrodden watch reruns of their worst life mistakes play in reverse in the ruined cinema behind their eyes.
I hear birdsongs and bullets, soft baby babble and the hardscrabble of skid row loners.
And somewhere in my city, there’s the voice of an alleyway angel saying,
optimism isn’t the perfect prophylactic. But it does help to reduce the risk of certain unwanted pessimisms.
my soul is fragranceless, and I have no common sense.
I am months behind in my mental rent, and my memories threaten foreclosure.
The canned laughter of crusty conversations is sometimes all I can afford to eat. It tastes a little like humble pie, only with a much older expiration date.
My bank account has decided to go on a silent meditation retreat to slow its depletion. It tells me it’ll write from time to time, but all I’ve received so far are checks that bounce higher than bunny rabbits on Adderall.
Hollywood has exiled me to the outermost regions of insignificance, where I attend class reunions with B-movie subplots and exquisite corpses.
I don’t believe the devil when he says “trust me” or when Jesus says, “it’s just water.”
But I do believe in grace. Her tattooed wings stay secured even in the most unforgiving bar light.
RichRant 