Two-By-Four (A Drive Through My Personal World)

Racing over night roads in a car that's not mine,

Smacked by musical two-by-fours in four-four time,

I think back fifty pounds ago—twenty-odd years.

I'm still moved by the same wants, the same lack of fears,

and even the music I play is the same.

So every new challenge I shrink from or tame,

The new people I meet in the places I see

Change the length of my story, but never change me,

and the night road I drive? It's a loop or a heart.

When the twists are all totaled, I end where I start.

My Personal World, Part 25: Open Up Old Times

I get out this album, again, and I open up old times,

Improved by melody, meter, and rhymes.

I remember the one who made my good times better,

Improved them with sympathy, laughter and letter.

I remember this one gave me understanding, stimulation

When I was at my worst, with no career or avocation.

I remember how this one served as my armor,

Protection from myself and enemies at my door.

I remember the ones who supported my foreign years,

Who forged a connection 'tween my home and my heres.

I listen and remember, or at least I try,

and I smile because I forgot how to cry.

My Personal World, Part 24: Relativity

Bass banging out a blistering back-beat,

Hoping against hope to hold the high point

Of the dying week,

The ticky-tack ticking-away of time

Siphons, slurps, slips, sags, slides, settles,

Into a slow leak.

My Personal World, Part 23: The Haunted House In My Head

I don't remember the names, just the notes
That fill my head and my bedroom with ghosts,
Which is neither surprising nor quite the usual.
I'm left wondering if I'm really delusional,
If the chords wore shortcuts down in my head,
Or if I'm just easily (musically) led.
Keep the mix right, watch the ghosts coalesce;
One wrong song, they leave with unwanted gentleness,
Drawing back into the darkness, dancing dirges
To a second-rate soundtrack.

My Personal World, Part 22: Baggage/Around the World in 8 Tracks

If I am ever really known, then I am known to travel light.

I lost most of my memories along the road one night.

The bumps were bruising, the memories too heavy for my mind.

I think those twist and turns were also too much for my fright.

I last saw my shame on the way down a pass on I-90.

It couldn't keep up with so many bad decisions at high speed.

I might've left my marbles just east of the Mississippi.

They didn't weigh me down; I just didn't want 'em with me.

I'm not an accountant, but still, I don't fight

The influence of tastes past on my future, my life.

If I did, I'd need insurance no agent provides

For the times high-flying, erratic-steering memory collides

With the steady, ceaseless, high-speed driving of a beat,

From my most recent metal, and back to oldies.

I'm not really known for traveling heavy.

Nevertheless, I carry most of the music with me.

My Personal World, Part 21: Turn It Off, I Can't Stop Listening

The song invites inspiration and half-lost memory

Into a gray and dreary-lightless no-person's territory.

The memory, the music and the inspiration

Tease me–I hear and feel, but can't quite see them.

If they were any closer, I'd say so close I can taste,

But I'm only playing music, not horseshoes or hand-grenades.

My Personal World, Part 20: Extra Extraterrestrial

No plans are just what I want from a day.

Well, that and means–and an excuse–to fly away.

With a beat for a seat and a melody for thrusters,

I killed most of an afternoon in a parallel universe.

I made my waking life surreal enough for bed,

Seeing new worlds without the mess in the back of my head.

I've grown to love the abstract and the distant, the unreal,

Despite, and all the more for, their somewhat limited appeal.

Some might say I could miss things here on earth while I am gone,

But that kind of worry's not my kind of thing to waste my time on.

My Personal World, Part 19: Bittersweet Time Machine

I remember the first time that rhythm caught me.

It didn't exactly hit me in the head.

It was nothing nearly so violent as that.

It kind of grabbed me under the arm

and yanked me a quarter-turn around.

If you want to pick nits,

It was an illegal block above the waist.

Today, again, that same rhythm caught me.

It didn't exactly pull me to the ground.

After all, this isn't the first time around.

It kind of got in real close, face to face,

Until I let it take me by the hand

and lead me right back into the other moment.

If you want to pick nits,

It didn't leave room for the Holy Spirit.

I wonder when the rhythm will catch me again.

I wonder how gentle it will be next time.

Will it remind me of the winter, the couch, the friends,

Or the tragedies of the spring that followed behind?

Will it come with a caress or a kick?

All I know is that the rhythm is finished,

and it left me at least a little bit tired–

Perhaps not of it...

If you want to pick nits.

My Personal World, Part 18: And Lady Mondegreen

A lyric drops me in the deep end of a teeming memory

Because of a mishearing that I wish the song could be.

Other times mistaken eardrums send me down into the gutter,

Awash in thoughts that I regret, or relish, but can't shutter,

But usually when my mind over ears trip and fall,

The image I land in makes no sense at all.

My Personal World, Part 17: Ten Words

It takes forty bars to get stuck in your head.

Those are memories ears don't forget,

But sometimes it only takes ten words to know

That a new song I hear echoes ten years ago,

Hitting bittersweet chords, a new graduate's theme,

Two songs nothing alike but they bring hindsight-dreams.

They both make me feel young. They both make me feel old.

They alter time's flow in my personal world.

My Personal World, Part 16: Enough Times in a Day

If you listen to a song enough times in a day

It starts to mean what happens, not what the lyrics say,

and becomes less a song than footsteps' cadence on a journey,

Which is why I proofread the end of my novel to Mat Kearney

and the middle of it to Carrie Underwood.

Just don't ask me why I never listen to anything good.

My Personal World, Part 15: Fertile Fields

What was once a new song's fields fertile verdure

Now seems as distant – as old – as my ardor.

What was once the edge of uncharted words' wood's now bereft,

Which is to say that I see nothing there left

For me, if not for the one who hears it next.

My Personal World, Part 14: My Watch-Dog

What was once my watch-dog, warding depression,

Now grates on my ears.  The mangy chord-progression,

The rib-visible skeleton of an over-pushed beat

That once kindled my action has been losing its heat,

Shedding eight-notes as it grinds over my dried mind.

A fiery song that burns long is sure hard to find,

and soon, with no watchdog I find myself hurled,

Overthrown down from my personal world.

My Personal World, Pt. 13: Wind-Drift

I'm lost in my manic wind-drift dream-world,
Lost for all but the musical,
So lectures on implications of changes in English curricula
Last about as long as the beat in my head,
and while you can't stop it, I drop it for another,
Traveling my personal world down the path of a river
Of sound, interrupted by rocky discussions
Of departmental funding or what the stars
Or sunspots in my head reveal about dark riffs.
The music's only in my head, but life's only at the bottom of the cliff.

My Personal World, Part 12: I Would Just Replace Summer

If I ran the world, I would just replace summer.

With hot September Sundays for floaters and sunners,

Cool autumn breezes from college football's beginning,

The Fall Classic in the atmosphere for fifteen hundred innings,

A walk under the glow that the harvest moon's shedding,

Mixed with yellowing streetlights and treetops all red'ning,

and a new slate of classes.  I'd never stop learning

Over trivial thoughts of production and earning.

That's where I go, zoned out, with notebook and tunes,

My off-label cure for the Summertime Blues.

My Personal World, Part 11: Never Be the Same

It's that first song your parents can't stand to hear

That nobody can keep from catching your ear,

That first moment that leaves you separate from them.

Let me tell you: you'll never go back again.

It's playing when you first realize that for every beat

Someone else's world ends in tragedy,

And when you say “I remember when that came out, twenty years ago.”

In those moments, even before you find out, you know,

That though to put it to words sounds incredibly lame

Your own personal world will never be the same.

My Personal World, Part 10: Out of Your Silence

Get up out of your silence.  Come out, follow me.
What's there to lose, besides your virginity
and other things you can't look for and find --
Your way, your words, the past, your place, your time, your peace of mind,
A truce between shyness and dancing, your inner saint and inner jerk,
A parallel universe where things actually work.
You never know what you're going to see
When the music's your tour guide and the music's in me.

My Personal World, Part 9: Lost

New music can at times confuse me,
With art or wordplay quickly lose me
and leave my ears in foggy weather
With words I've never heard together,
But I say, what a paltry cost
For exploration, to be lost.

My Personal World, Part 8: My Thinking-Sound

I'm on edge, distracted, and dinking around.

It's time to put on my thinking-sound,

My hi-fi, one-size-fits-all solution

To the rest of the world's worst sorts of noise pollution:

Traffic, sirens, construction, the marital strife,

The worst sorts of reminders of urbanized life,

and the in-laws and bosses, who tend to insist.

Music builds me a world where those things don't exist,

But as I get older, my needs become loud –

Sonic fences built high keep the unwelcome out.

My Personal World, Part 7: Against Bad News or Boredom

A mere magazine serves as only a shield

Against bad news or boredom, which life always wields.

I fight those things off with my musical sword,

Defending the personal calm that I hoard.

Plant my sword in the ground, see the hilt has unfurled

Like a tree that I climb to my personal world.