Ocean Eyes

If I could paint, I would have by now. But I can't. I can't even take pictures half of the time; or rather, I can't make a camera capture what I see. I can take a picture of what I'm looking at, but it doesn't grab...what I see. It's like how a loved one isn't the same when they're chatting with you across the table as they are in a casket. Somethings missing.

All I can do anymore is stare until whatever I want to capture is engraven somewhere in my retina, hopefully being converted to storage somewhere in my brain. Often I don't even know if I'm successful--if I forgot it I couldn't remember it to have known I failed at remembering it in the first place.

I could stand here for one run of 93 Million Miles and turn in to bed like I intended, but I'll forget these night caps; these white cresting waves folding out of a dark drifting sea that pans on until the world ends. The ocean seems conquerable in the daylight; that perhaps just beyond that far-see there's an island or the drop-off. It would be easy and pleasant to go out and see. It's in the dark that the depth becomes incongruent. There is no horizon, only the expanse of ocean wrapping up into the night sky that so fittingly mirrors its shade. It curls under the flat surface of the earth where the salt water swirls in space of eons, crashing and breaking across itself and the thousands of shipwrecked ruins that Earth's surface has written off and forgotten.

This person is not the same as the one I chatted with this afternoon. It has transformed into something else entirely. Gentle hands call me to come in, be enveloped, and stay forever. Archaic blackness swirls off to where the wild things are. Death and happiness and fortitude and loss all scream in the roar of salt water.

I want to know where she'll take me, for in this moment she is a woman, teeming with life yearning to better minor or take it for her own.

But I watch her from a distance, barred in by a deck and a leg-shattering fall from leaping and running to her, from meeting and capturing what my camera and pen cannot. And what my eyes barely retain.

I wonder why muses were ever given a humanoid form. The Greeks must not have monitored their sea by night.

She speaks in tongues and an aquatic sign, but for a moment, perhaps, she is clear to you, as an individual, dashing your heart's desire in the nettles of her wake.

She is wanting. She is inspiring. She is calling.

I pray I have cemented her enough for recollection. And worry lest she changes again.

Waves and the Both of Us

I'm awake. It's like that hour was an exfoliating scrub to my soul; all the dead cells and dust particles were scourged from the crevices and creases and washed with a gush of water. I was held fast against a wall of force that ripped the ill-intentioned from me. I was scrubbed down and power rinsed. I fell to my knees, wet. By weaving our souls together as one and challenging to open to the world I became awake.

Even through my headphones, through this new album, I'm swimming. I'm swimming in awareness and it crashes gently against me like tender waves. The torrent that cleansed me swept the clutter away, but water continued to fill the space, swirling in peace about me.

I could fall in love today. That's how open my heart is. I could fly, that's how free my soul sings.

One hour has changed me.

One hour to remind me why I can't resign from theatre, one hour to wipe clean the slate I've scribbled observations on -one hour to show me the slate is still good; I can still observe.

One hour to find myself the way I'll be once my spirit melts out of this vesicular state and finds havoc in the clouds. Warmth. Currents of energy. Connection. Bravery. Peace. Love.

And it's turning into the longing to be somewhere else. The longing to know other voices, to sense other trees, to walk different roads and call different names. It's turning into the longing to run away -to grow old and escape. Or to take a pen to paper, or don a mask of recitation. To create, either through the faculty of my mind or that of my entire being.

I'm awake, fresh, alert, ready to dash waves against stone until I'm looking at something as perfect as I feel. Something awake.