clear cut heart

http://laura-sliva.blogspot.com/2009/11/objectwords-part-2.html

he sings his freedom on the day i'm supposed to rest but have instead come in because i cannot rest or play inside. free falling he sings above the din. free falling in the corner of the room and i'm free because if you are you better sing. because if you are free you have time to sing about it instead of just being, and only the recently emancipated can sing this loud. the i sounds like a cross between ah and um as if meeting the ah and the um somewhere between the idea of freedom and the hesitation before he jumps. and i'm free he sings, falling as he slides down the vowel, where do you land after you have jumped in? is there any landing in freedom or is it all falling, a monotonous plunge, never landing? can you ever be free on solid ground? am i too old to even ask? free falling as the guitar jangles like a massive ring of keys, someone fumbles for the one that unlocks the door between free and falling. he is a man with too many keys, a man with too many doors that have to be kept closed and locked, like that man outside, running inside his black. as the man seated too close behind me where i sit bent over ruled paper with the sunlight beautiful above my head and i think, a day given up for money is a shovel full of dirt tossed beside the hole. the man seated behind me, who i do not see, accelerates into his laughter like a turn his throat throttles through until its louder & louder, while another man up ahead arrives at pavement by way of rope, where he pauses to untether, casually gathering his life into his arms and then marches up the street, straight into the sun. today is a parade of convertibles, as if they had been waiting all year for the sky's cloudless blessing. free falling, so free he lost the g on the way down. what a gorgeous day to drive your pride & joy around! who are you in this city, do you know? and if so, why are you so sure? feeling for a string we could hold together, to keep us from falling, but why this string? don't tell me it was just dangling there. awakened too early by the morning engine's rev. the rpm's of the houseless pressed into the red beneath my window. an old woman wearing an old man's clothes, brown trousers & a boring striped brown shirt, paces the downtown corner, shock of gray hair, wild like the glass removed from a bulb of burnt filaments, still thirsty to burn, gesticulating at both people and demons alike and what's the difference anyway? for her or for us? someday you may be mad on a corner like that. someday you will have stepped too far from the story and you won't want to come back or maybe you won't be able to feel its thread in the dark. pacing the palace of lesser desire, injured by every stray glance, thoughtlessness flung like an absence you thought couldn't hurt, thumbing the waistband of your too large for you pants while the other does its business in the golden afternoon light. free falling. but what if you're free, and want nothing, and everyone asks what do you want and you realize that desire is a fuel and life goes nowhere without it, that your life is not alive without the fire you put out. and then you come to, sitting among the wreckage of all you severed, cleared, and burnt, a plain of stumps where a forest once hummed, scabbed and scarred, resting uneasily in the nothing that's always & only arising.

www.johnbmuellerphotography.com