My working hours have gone by quickly, and my nonworking hours have been spent finishing up knitting and beading projects for the sale on Saturday (a fund raiser/rummage sale with "eclectic items" and other things). I just finished making some more earrings and then pricing all my earrings and knit purses. If I sell a good number of the nine purses and 33 pairs of earrings, I should make a nice little bit of extra cash. This is my first attempt at selling any of my creations, even though I've been making stuff since I was in my early teens. Anyway, I'm excited to see what will transpire.
Since I've been sitting around in my room, crafting, I've been listening to a lot of music: mostly Pink Floyd, North Mississippi Allstars and, of course, Deb Talan (see the "Listening" list at right). I found the first two CDs at the library this week, and I'm thoroughly enjoying them. I find it surprising that I never really listened to Pink Floyd before. (My dad is proud that I'm expanding my horizons to include classic 70s music. If I start playing Fleetwood Mac, he might really go crazy with the air guitar...but he listens to enough of that on his own.)
While my hands are busy, I find myself thinking about a lot of various things. It's been a nice interlude (although I've been staying up too late and worry that I won't have enough for the sale). I usually find myself in the mode of "If I think about something interesting or at all deep, I have to write about it, either in a poem, in my journal or on my blog," but this week I've been letting most of the thoughts pass through my mind. I've enjoyed them and then let them go. It's not always easy, but it's necessary. If I turn everything outward, I'll become a jumbled mess of introversion gone wrong.
I know I've mentioned her many times before, but Deb Talan's lyrics never cease to captivate me. Many of her lines run through my mind at all hours. This morning I woke up (from a strange dream) with one of her songs in my head. I don't remember which one it was, but these lines often find their way into the conscious portion of my mind:
Our heads say hold back, but our hearts run to strangers and say, "Look at me, look at me, look at me..."
(She has good grammar, too; her lyrics are all printed out nicely, with proper spelling, capitalization and punctuation. I like that.)
Those lines are from a song about love, of course, but I can connect them to any number of situations. We all want to be noticed. There's that thing called pride, and that Christian virtue called humility that we're supposed to possess (without knowing we possess it, of course), as well as the meek spirit for which women especially are praised. But sometimes we just want to run up, childlike, and get someone's attention.
When I listen to a lot of music and pay attention to the lyrics, it tends to influence my poetry. (Actually, my listening and reading often influence my poetry...as does almost everything else.) I wrote this one last night, just before sleep:
A Man, a Child, a Dream
4-27-05
Let the thing be what it is---a furious
song of happenstance,
a collection of sighs, a dim light in the window,
a bar of soap untouched.
Let the thing create a space for itself, let it be
its own size, fill its own skin
with a word or two, with silence.
Let the thing grow, if it will; let it open
its arms to the beast of wisdom. Let it ride.
It will not be carried away
forever, or too far.
It will traverse that slow arc of being
that always brings each thing back
to its beginning, more or less
unharmed, if not unchanged,
a fingernail bruised and grown to mend,
the sound of a voice worn into the mind, a laugh.
Let the thing write its own story, let it erase
the chapters in the language it does not understand.
It will learn the difference between truth
and fiction, a tale and a lie.
© 2005 April K Szuch
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