Hey, you –get off a my cloud!

I have always been moved by spoken word.  When I was young, I was into hard rock and things that were moving way too fast for most people to catch.  Of course I thought I knew it all.  It wasn’t until this summer after I graduated high school, that I met a girl who turned me on to the works of Jim Morrison.  I never liked the Doors.  Oh the music had rhythm and it was groovy, but I was too young to appreciate the revolutionary design of the band.  The guitar player played his instrument like a violin or fiddle.  The keyboard player sounded like a mad carnival, and the drummer was somebody they had met in a meditation class.  And then there was Jim, a street poet who had dropped out of film school.  I had no use for any of’ em.  I got a book of his poems that created a hunger in me to express myself in mysterious yet cognitive forms.  I never got there.  I was so moved by his effortless mastery of metaphor that I didn’t even try.

I wrote poetry for years thinking that the only necessary qualifier was that it rhymed and told a clever story or allegory.  I began writing music in my late teens, but with no formal training in an instrument and being surrounded by accomplished musicians all of whom were in other bands that played every other night, I found no way to hone my voice and elected instead to sit quietly in the corners listening to other people’s rhythms and beats and writing down scores of lyrics to other people’s music.  None of it would ever be heard.  Years later after learning the hard lessons of love and loneliness, I turned to an acoustic guitar that a father had given his pregnant daughter to learn to play after her husband had left her during the pregnancy.  She was too fat to hold it on her lap.  So she gave it to me.  One summer became three as a fumbled across its strings and hoped to conjure some emotion in my empty heart and soften to blow of unrequited love that had saddened my soul.  

I was always enchanted by love songs.  Even before I knew what love was or had experienced the pains of female companionship, I was drawn into the truth and honesty of seventies music.  I learned to play by rearranging the pieces of love songs gone by, that elicited a great emotional release and a subsequent hunger that could only be quenched by, - words.  It was at this moment that I discovered the true power of language in my life and at my disposal.  It was the power to heal.  I started with myself.  I found it easy to code or decoded my emotions and distress to the timing and melodies created from the left over chords and pieces of songs I hadn’t learned to play completely.  I learned to rearrange those notes and pluck my own heart strings. I can now write a whole song in more fluid motion in the number of minutes once I find the right melody.  I can say exactly how I feel and it comes across well. It has healed my heart and saved me from the depths on more than one occasion and others too. The gift that this expression has given me in being heard has been life changing, even though the one most often wrote about never sticks around long enough for me to nail it, I get release knowing  someone has heard how I feel, a sweet added irony. I have never, however, been able to break the mold of popular rhythm and rhyme in convention.  I have never achieved the level of mastery of a proper poet. I do my thing but, I'm certainly no Jim Morrison.