Curve Of The Earth

There’s no question that music is a great motivator for me, a wealth of inspiration and more often than not, I can’t write unless the stereo is on or I’m safe in my headphones.

For example, I’m working on a new short story which I will hopefully be able to write, polish and share here with you.  While getting to know the characters who introduced themselves to me, I found myself listening to ‘Big Band Cantina’ on iTunes radio, fitting for them and helpful for me to delve deeper into their story.  I sometimes like to ‘listen’ to my characters through music. It allows me to gain greater insight into their whole heart.

On occasion music inspires me in a completely different fashion.  Sometimes a song culls a piece of writing just because something moves me.  I am compelled to share this piece with you because I think the song is stunning and you’d be well advised to seek it out and have a listen.  Performed by Death on Mars from San Diego, recently nominated for a San Diego Music Award, ‘Curve of the Earth’ is beautifully sad and haunting.  In turn, I wrote a piece in homage, mixing my prose with the compelling lyrics.

Curve of the Earth

Everything is truncated.  And you don’t want to know the reasons; or that I know where the how is the why and the who is the what.  I’m not supposed to be here but here I am, swallowing down a simple prescription, humming temperance hymns and falling down for being proud. 

Blue means bruises …

I’m too young to kneel and too old to sequence together the frames of 2am TV and late night radio station static.  I’m misanthropic, any chance I get to deviate from the plane, to bend and shape, bow to resemble the pure arc of a charmed mood-altering ring, I pursue the path and suspend straight through until the regrettable end.

Taking advantage …

Wait, don’t stop reading.  I bought into the myth, so will you.  I am many things but I am not completely devoid of joy.  Look at me, so full of pant and drive, personifying the full assault of the senses the ripened continuation of my oeuvre warrants.  It’s natural movement, slow and sullen. It’s not a performance but a generosity.

Round and round and round we go …

Our correlation is slender but consequential.   I admit it is intricate and polarizing, pushed up against imposing scenery; multi-coloured, multi-layered, three dimensional, where land like sea is distinct from sky and I can’t tell us apart because we’re spliced together like a movie reel, the product of our heads governing our heart’s territory. 

Falling so fast …

Where was I after the crash?  I was idle, soaking up vivid depictions of confidence, setting words on fire, stirring the doggerel.  The tenacity of the action stretches you, lays you out, exposed, and leaves you thirsty for some type of parallel, any variation to a person, thing, a place, a memory.  And yet most of the time we reside flat, formal, a far cry from the anticipation and passionate reverberation our earnest imaginings and the acumen of our years dictate.

Drowning in fire, burning in water …

And what of you?  You are alone but infinitely superior to all.  You leave an unbelievable inscription on my integrated ingredients, elusive yet magnified, reduced, organized by irrelevant value.  And after all that you’re still poised to fracture, still restless, passive, at rock bottom, slouched against the headboard.  Your heart is wrung and yet mirrors a sliver of moonlight so minute that if you blink you might miss it.

Trying to stand still …

Life is full of surprises.  Unaccompanied I have become incongruous, a sore admission but accurate.  Creative impulses occupy the mind, a cause to celebrate yet the kindred assimilation of the notion chastises.  Perhaps the greatest love had the audacity to disarm, reducing it all to the fragrance of noise and an expurgated version of carefully constructed compromise, leaving me with an immense desire to weep -- despairingly so, unapologetically so.

Tripping over sidewalk cracks …

And again, you?  You laugh and raise your glass, masking your dormant sensuality with eloquent silence; a fact I knowingly underestimate to endorse my own secret longings.  And what a coincidence that we are both filled with some kind of reverberated light.  It is not contagious but exclusive and in good accord with all of the sobriquets lent to such things.

Weightless for now …

It’s like Charles Bukowski said, “There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first.  We are always ripe and ready to be taken.”  You can’t help but consent.  So, for now, the only proper thing to do, while we wait patiently to be annihilated is to drink and embrace the inherent strengths of deployed rapture, embracing the cusp of the night or the beginnings of morning.

Heels over head …

To avoid risking ridicule, to skirt being endowed with lacerating critiques, I relent, with my interior anesthesia, hang on the periphery of understanding, face blazed, orating an entire vocabulary stanch and articulate to transmit the temporary bliss of being blithe and buoyant.  All that is constant and paralyzing are not strangers to me and I may not offer anything of beauty or of extraordinary measure but when envy has a gift for you, you take it and pass it on.

Brown eyes turn to tears …   

Everything is abridged.  The whole mania is edited by conscious concern and patience in anticipation for the quantum leap.  You know the interchange.  You inspire it.  You encourage it despite my penchant for liking to be let down.  And if you stick around long enough I’ll be pixilated somewhere between the inflections of rhetorical choices and gradient flight.  I’ll swindle the floorboards up and lure the ceiling down, just because I can.

Overlooking the edge …

And in the end it’s like a song,

            a verse

            a chorus (times two)

            more verse

            more chorus (times two)

            the bridge

            the last chorus (times two)

            the fade out …

The curve of the earth never looked so perfect…

           

I’ve been slack on the blogging this month but you know how that goes when life gets busy.  I still scribble every day, read and do crosswords to stay sharp.  I even spent part of my Thanksgiving dinner coloring with the kids at the dinner table, anything to stay creative.

My goal this week is to piece together all of the bits and pieces I’ve scratched on paper for this new story I’ve got my head in.  It’s proving to be both a pleasure and a challenge.  I want to do these two justice so slow and easy it’ll be.

Until next time, stay classy.

In propinquity,

Nic