RANGE
There is the wound, the wounded, and the wounder. All three can, and often do, live within one body. A chrysanthemum at the throat of winter easily enters that body and stays there until the mum is freed: mentioned in passing, cast in a film, dispatched to the field of a clean page. The age of the freedom fighter, the mental health of the director, the color of ink need not prove stifling. No—what’s most vital now and always resides with the properties of presence, openness, curiosity as it pertains to motion (i.e., action), and safety and options as these pertain to connection.
°°°
A life is built one day at a time. A child is served a bowl of cold cereal by a bruised, trembling hand—a hand far larger and aged than the child’s. Only two sounds pervade here: yelling and silence. The monsoons come. Thunderclaps and the susurrations of rain mask the yelling. As the child matures and finds adulthood, the years between have much to say but no means to say it. From these ingredients, a voice is born,the same way time and pressure eventually produce gemstones.
°°°
Voice: the act of freeing the unsaid.
WEIGHT
One retractable ball point pen: 17.3 grams.
One standard piece of notebook paper: 5 grams.
Three broken marriages due to active alcoholism.
One five-year-old child that hasn’t eaten in three days.
Same child, now nineteen years of age, wearing prison-issued overalls, shackled, and waiting to be transferred to a supermax prison in another state.
Being listened to and understood by a perfect stranger.
Knowing loneliness well enough to ignore what it has to say, day in, day out.
Arriving at the age of seventy-nine on the same day an eviction notice is issued.
Learning the little you own was stolen while you slept.
There’s no question that your hands and feet are frozen, but they’re not blue and numb in places. At least, not yet.
On the drive to work: an elderly woman along the median holds a sign that says, “I don’t want your money, I just want something to eat.”
Knowing that most people don’t care why most poems have short lines and continuing to write them anyway.
A single mother keeps watch while her daughter, who “needs new everything,” sleeps in the car, their home for three months now.
You can’t get the ears of the young Navajo man out of your mind.
“They look this way because I twist and twist them for hours.
Doing that stops the voices sometimes.”
One retractable ballpoint pen: 17.3 grams.
One standard piece of notebook paper: 5 grams.
Arriving at the age of seventy-nine on the same day an eviction notice is issued.
Learning the little you own was stolen while you slept.
There’s no question that your hands and feet are frozen, but they’re not blue and numb in places. At least, not yet.
On the drive to work: an elderly woman along the median holds a sign that says, “I don’t want your money, I just want something to eat.”
Knowing that most people don’t care why most poems have short lines and continuing to write them anyway.
A single mother keeps watch while her daughter, who “needs new everything,” sleeps in the car, their home for three months now.
You can’t get the ears of the young Navajo man out of your mind.
“They look this way because I twist and twist them for hours.
Doing that stops the voices sometimes.”
One retractable ballpoint pen: 17.3 grams.
One standard piece of notebook paper: 5 grams.
TESSITURA
Lighting. Seating and table arrangement. Proxemics. Pens and notebooks. Speaking at appropriate volumes, employing appropriate tones. Appropriate to the creation and maintenance of a safe, tranquil environment. Options galore. Building trust and rapport always and always. Communal collaboration. The “i” in Unity for the hole in the donut.
°°°
The space between notes, so sistered to the space between beats—if not for these spaces, would music exist? Would we exist if not for rest? If not for respite? And what of the space between meals? When might we digest if not for these caesurae?
°°°
Fact: what’s sung need not feel comfortable to the singer to heal or be healed.
Fact: what’s sung need not feel comfortable to the listener to be healed, or to heal others later by re-singing what was earlier sung.
Fiction: all rock-n-roll singers shoot heroin.
Fact: comfort is a noun typically searching for a safe place to sleep for the night.
Fiction: prose was bred to deliver the news and only the news.
Fact: poetry comforts the disturbed when not disturbing the comfortable.
Fiction: I touched a frog once. It was summer. Even so, my sciatica was killing me.
Fiction: in order to feel comfortable in a writing workshop, one must like to write.
Fact: in order to feel comfortable in marriage, it’s best to be a little blind, a little dumb, and a little deaf.
Fiction: writing has no opposite.
Fact: where the words come from …
Fact: where they go once written …
Fact: the sound they make when they land—no one really knows.
°°°
Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. —Pablo Picasso
TIMBRE
Some voices are made of straw.
Others of satin.
The voices of grandfathers have wings and claws that click when landing.
Some voices snore in their sleep.
Some voices don’t believe cows can fly. It’s sad, I know.
The voice of uncles that drink too much at family gatherings sound like someone shaking gravel saddled inside a red wheelbarrow.
You can’t reason with a voice even though voices age.
If a voice touches you in the right spot, parts of your life will change forever.
The voices of politicians—not all, but most—smell like burning hair.
Whereas the voice of an infant mirrors the grace of cumulus clouds.
Most voices crack a little when touched.
If more humans understood the platforms of well-meaning Chihuahuas running for local and state offices, perhaps they’d win more votes.
The voice of the frog I touched was prone to weep before angels.
I learned all this years later. It’s sad, I know.
Some voices mirror the values of Arabian horses at full gallop when all four hooves are clean off the only Earth we know of.
Some voices lick their paws between poems.
I hear voices being freed every day of the week. Many of them locked away for decades, somewhere deep inside the country of this and that host.