So jazz music is really a conversation

one eavesdrops on and it is of course a good kind of eavesdropping, though one could always choose to exert effort and pretend to be discreet as if the conversation isn't something one should be privy to. Either way, the

chatter between the drums and the sax and the trumpets and the piano and the cello and all that scatting

should perk the mind up into action so that one emerges more intelligent after the whole auscultating-slash-snooping thing, or more awake, at least, because all that exchange could only be more poetry than non-poetry

and poetry more often bestirs the brain cells than not, so it is, perhaps, safe to say that aside from a confabulation among voice and/or instruments, jazz is also poetry.

Blink/Blank

Mostly, I just stare, then blink, and realize there's nothing to write about. Scenes from my day, or my week, flash briefly across some blankness and then go away, just as quickly. I blink again and realize, once more, that there's nothing to write about. There's this germ of a writing project that's planted itself into my mind's soil that's been haunting me from time to time, though when I sit down to begin, I find that there's nothing there.

Even that last sentence was an afterthought (whose verity should not be discredited, however).

I should go away, one of these days.

Then I'll probably bring something back with me, something to tend that seed with.

Excuses, excuses.

The trouble

with weather forecasting is that it's right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it.  
-Patrick Young

Dedication to M

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Swing of the heart. O firmly hung, fastened on what invisible branch. Who, who gave you the push, that you swung with me into the leaves? How near I was to the exquisite fruits. But not-staying is the essence of this motion. Only the nearness, only toward the forever-too-high, all at once the possible nearness. Vicinities, then from an irresistibly swung-up-to place --already, once again, lost--the new sight, the outlook. And now: the commanded return back and across and into equilbrium's arms. Below, in between, hesitation, the pull of earth, the passage through the turning-point of the heavy--, past it: and the catapult stretches, weighted with the heart's curiosity, to the other side, opposite, upward. Again how different, how new! How they envy each other at the ends of the rope, these opposite halves of pleasure. Or, shall I dare it: these quarters?--And include, since it witholds itself, that other half-circle, the one whose impetus pushes the swing? I'm not just imagining it, as the mirror of my here-and-now arc. Guess nothing. It will be newer someday. But from endpoint to endpoint of the arc that I have most dared, I already fully possess it: overflowings from me plunge over to it and fill it, stretch it apart, almost. And my own parting, when the force that pushes me someday stops, makes it all the more near. P.S. Happy Birthday to: Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Italo Calvino, P.G. Wodehouse, and Mario Puzo. Libras, all.

I'm thinking that around eleven hundred dozen thoughts

must already have been in my mind and gone away and I never had one chance to really mull them over. Well, maybe a chance, or two, but the days have again blurred into so many yesterdays and I'm left with nothing to reign them in with. The world I know has been--and still is--afloat with five, six figures preceded by dollar signs, percentages, goals to be reached, action plans to put into action, a team to lead, differences to neutralize.

Numbers, numbers, more numbers. This is one of the great ironies of my life. When I was in school, I hated my Math classes to the core, but look what I have become now: an employee in a bank, munching on numbers for lunch.

But anyway, on my ride home today, I found myself grinning like a fool while in my head I danced to some cheesy 90's song from some juvenile girl band. It's been a recurring daydream, really, and it tickles my funny bones to no end, the fact that I get so much entertainment from watching myself performing, on stage, some really basic, corny, girly steps. And then the scene shifts to another dream sequence where I am Shania Twain and her "That Don't Impress Me Much" video is really my video and I'm wearing that leopard print outfit and I have red hair and I'm rolling my eyes at the rocket scientist, the guy with the hair kept in place by so much extra-hold gel and the guy who's really Brad Pitt. And I'm singing, of course. And then there's a shift again and it's still the same song but I'm singing it live, in front of an audience made up of the folks at work and I'm still wearing the same outfit and rolling my eyes.

Hmm. Whaddya say, could it be that in the deepest recesses of my subconscious, I have some delusional hope that I could become famous? The word is delusional. But, hey, we all have to take a break from our own daily grinds, right?

After all, it's really the light, seemingly silly things that help us get by.

Here

is never where there is and I am made to make do with what is in it: the two shoe boxes under the shoe cabinet, the coffee mug on top of it, the yellow stress ball perched so snugly on the mug's mouth, the film of dust on the ball, the nothing in the dust which can't be nothing but which I call nothing because I cannot see it--

Men With the Heads of Eagles

by Margaret Atwood

Men with the heads of eagles
no longer interest me
or pig-men, or those who can fly
with the aid of wax and feathers

or those who take off their clothes
to reveal other clothes
or those with skins of blue leather

or those golden and flat as a coat of arms
or those with claws, the stuffed ones
with glass eyes; or those
hierarchic as greaves and steam-engines.

All these I could create, manufacture,
or find easily: they swoop and thunder
around this island, common as flies,
sparks flashing, bumping into each other,

on hot days you can watch them
as they melt, come apart,
fall into the ocean
like sick gulls, dethronements, plane crashes.

I search instead for the others,
the ones left over,
the ones who have escaped from these
mythologies with barely their lives;
they have real faces and hands, they think
of themselves as
wrong somehow, they would rather be trees.


found here.

Brr

Walking in the rain (and I don't mean a drizzle) on a gray morning (and this is not some drama shit, I had simply forgotten to bring an umbrella, is all)

So it's the rain who ushers October in. I forgot who did for September.
It's officially windburn season for me. Time to stack up on lip balms again.