From The Back Love Song
Chanson d'amour ... Shir Ahava ... Serenade ... We're standing at the foot of a tree asking our housemates to come down and receive offerings of an ear ... on a small velvet pillow ... with a satin choral group becoming the audience ... Singing to children in the sycamore branches ... Let's begin the next act with turning a Bodhi tree into a "unity table" ... We are the lamb who asks for ... next to candle flames ... whole accounts ... Over a beloved and beautiful evening ground ... No one is promising unrealistic devotion ... Just the burial of a proper narrative ... Plural togetherness held ... Come down us ... whoever is up there ... post ... limb ... down and feather Spirit ... Love involves ... with gentle ears ... lowering ... What our love song asks for is both ready and has not begun yet ...
Honor among thieves ... thieves among honor ... Honor given to the terrain ... thievery kept for ourselves ... and the party inside the virtue it admits to stealing from ... Reverence and Taking ... Come down to the bottom of our descent ... Come down to where water pools ... and Spirit lives as a spouse within us ... Trade place ... courtship is larceny ... and "this little proof" files the confession ... before asking anything about the young beings in the boughs ... Behind them is ... fire carried down to a stolen garden ... and works that embodies the language of the quiet soil ... Only the Spirit is the true holder of taken land ... We are just the good hearted inheritors of the taking ... Loving our place while saying how it was originally acquired ... Valley under every surface converses with "machines of valor" ...
Hush ... tell us your story again ... but not every part ... and love shows its commissioning and preparing hands ... Glance stolen ... theft confessed ... evidence muted ... Stains ... the past made visible ... governing the mouth ... A forest trail keeps its own ledger ... Stains have always been a nationalist habit ... The locomotive rail and song track ... We request that our blemishes not be mentioned ... with strains hiding inside stains ... Melodies moaning in the marks ... Every long marriage keeps its agreed unmentionables ... Two tree with river flowing through it ... To love becoming a new path walked ... For a time ignore the fragments that pick a fight with our Constitution ... This song vows to stain ... forbidden to speak of it ...
Damage gets reported in aggregate ... while the stains stay unmentioned ... These sentences growing up with our now adult kids ... Opening in crib ... cooing of beautiful baby ... to only a slight amount of damage ... lullaby performing mercy ... baby girl grows up to become a young woman is the language and song refusing to become something new ... An artist ... a teacher ... She/They double hood ... is no insult ... Tenderness phrased as good news ... Refusing every fairy tale's undamaged lie ... and cruelty's write-off ... When this song chimed its first rhyme ... a child came down ... and shared with us her most recent story ... A whole life told in one breath ... Impossible ... Not really ...
Because the stains can't be mentioned out loud ... we spin to manage life ... Rotate until our stains face away from the audience ... So is so to the ear ... Thread spun in an empty studio ... our retrospective show is carefully fabricated ... Whirling has grieving ancestors who pivot ... loving lineage ... gone from this earth ... Our loved ones who do not literally answer ... sway to a circle ghost dance ... Spun in the absence of the gone ... in the dance of their absence ... The missed joining a cast of every attraction ... At its root ... it is what it is has to go and live fully with love ... Love song intact walks in ... pretending it has nothing to do with a done somebody wrong number ... wearing idiom blues ... In the old tongue charity is love ... Charity's wedding assembling one at a time in a song ...
The songbird ... taken apart ... And the song's opening answers ... come down from the tree and tell us your story ... Song flight is ... migration without papers ... melodies crossing checkpoints that no physical body could ... and our fragments grants the impossible its license ... they can ... After the confession ink devours its page ... What's written is grounded and then fixed ... what's sung sweeter has larger wings ... kept eternal by the only dome and umbrella that migrates ... together as one ... We're with you and the melodic strains that you quell ... Hunters and songbirds held together ... Quill is the missing pen ... the feather taken ... to quill a melody is to quell it ...
The empty burlap bag has a ledger ... and the seeds aren't lost ... they're sown ... as our call seeds planted in the ground ... Fragments don't announce ... nothing left to hold ... Crawling forward blindly ... a germinating seed in the dark ... no map ... growth before light ... Come down from the tree ... walk into the valley ... on the trail ... Blind lovers crawl ... The very words Shakespeare's stone speaks to whoever stands over his bones ... good friend ... And the grinning big mouth with legs from the medicine show is shown the door ... The practice that ruled the tool can't reciprocate love ... in one voice ...
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*How this sounds is the final court response for this writing ... and whatever the ellipses ( pauses ) do when reading is felt knowledge only a stage performance can provide us ... in most cases*