Tuesday, May 15, 2012

5/15/12

This is a song that makes me want to write every feeling in the world ten times over, while simultaneously feeling like I will never come close to being half as beautiful about it.

Probably one of my favorite songs about growing up. Also one of my favorite songs from The Weakerthans, which is a tough list to make. Definitely some of my favorite lyrical phrases. Dusty school yards, elegant plumage, wet cement....phrases I should know enough to be able to emulate in my own writerly way. All I can tell myself is these things take time, practice, and getting up each morning to try again.



"We emerged from youth all wide-eyed like the rest/Shedding skin faster than skin can grow/and armed with hammers, feathers, blunt knives words, to meet and to define and to but you must know/the same games that we played in dirt, in dusty school yards has found a higher pitch and broader scale than we feared possible and someone must be picked last, and one must bruise and one must fail./And that still twitching bird was so deceived by a window, so we eulogized fondly, we dug deep and threw its elegant plumage and frantic black eyes in a hole, and rushed out to kill something new, so we could bury that, too.

The first chapters of lives almost made us give up altogether. /Pushed towards tired forms of self immolation that seemed so original, I must, we must never stop/watching the sky with our hands in our pockets, stop peering in windows when we know doors are shut. /Stop yelling small stories and bad jokes and sorrows, and my voice will scratch to yell many more,/but before I spill the things I mean to hide away, or gouge my eyes with platitudes of sentiment/I'll drown the urge for permanence and certainty; crouch down and scrawl my name with yours in wet cement."
~Sounds Familiar
The Weakerthans, Fallow