They're Not My Words: Part I

This Project is Stagnant (Get it Out of My Face!) - Latterman
We know things lose their shine over time. So the things that you love and you say wont feel the same way. So move out. Move on. Fall deep in love with your meaning, and if we haven't found it, I hope we can all start looking. So look out. Look up. Even though the skies are cloudy gray. Spend every new day looking deep and fall in love again. Because things can't stay new forever. We have to work to keep it together. Old melodies are renewed and recreated. We have to keep on singing.

Let's Contemplate the Consequence of Being

I saw a million cars cross this desert plain of billboards and bright city lights, and sad commercial gain. Where were they heading? Maybe west towards the sunset or futher to the edge of reason or perhaps to the end of the earth where they could contemplate what lay behind them. What I mean is they could think about the consequence of being, and I don't mean doing, and I don't mean thinking, I mean actually being. They could contemplate the consequence of being. I used to try and dream about what this place once looked like before the roads, and before the streetlights, gunfights, and midnight opening times. Yeah, I bet it was a flat place with birds circling skywards and the only roads paved out led to California or some other place of future promise unimaginable. So let's scuff our feet Ace, and take a walk outdoors, suck in that summer air and shake the dust off. Let's push start this motorbike and ride out to the ocean, dash across the sand and dive right into the waves. Or we could slip into the flow of traffic and keep riding the long train east, across the desert plain of city lights until we're out of that place. It's up to you to decide. Do you want the ocean waves and a subtle breeze that's blowing change or a cliff of an infinate peril drop and a deckchair facing oblivion where you can sit and take down the past, scene by scene with an hourglass counting down with each grain of sand the cost of dwelling on past failures. By the way, you can never turn back.

Out on the Streets with a Stagger and a Grin

I want to tell you what I've seen in a drunken haze on the city streets and it's just waves of resolution on the faces of night strangers. Shall we down another pint? What next though, bitter, black or blonde? I guess they're all good choices, great ideas, another one of yours tonight. I think it's great how we just open up and talk about truth and what it means to be here, in this bar, at this table, in this city, with these words. I could talk a million times and keep ploughing over the same familiar ground, it's a conversation much more adeqaute for friends and beer and slurring sentences. The pavement pounds outside with passing feet and friends embrace and laugh and talk and I'm buzzing, literally buzzing with a smile on my lips and my coat still on and I actually feel part of something here, I feel woken inside and accepted and I realise that I'm looked upon, I'm actually looked upon as a leader in there. Yes, I have positive attributes and I'm unique and something different. Did I lift the atmosphere at a time unimaginable, did I create new things? I don't think so. The people you are now were already there before me, but I was part of the hatching and coming together and I was proud to be centered so dearly and I was the peak of the pyramid but the next day I was sick and my head split open in two aching pieces. I was never a martyr, just a drunk, but it's all the same to us.

My Heart: The Jumble Sale

There was a table that stretched from the kerb to the door and it was heavy and aching with the past twenty years, and from some carefully folded napkins and a heap of dug-up bones that we found one sticky summer under hedges. There was a stack of magazines and some dog-eared novels steeped in laughter, tears and a read to rags aura that was radiating out into the street and the crowd. I saw a photo of us both and remembered swigging from the bottle and smoking until we swayed and couldn't stand. There were flashes of trainers, bass guitars and cd shops and thinking we were one on one with the world. A microscope lost in some damp dark cupboard and a draw full of cd's and video tapes. There were sheets of pulled off wallpaper and posters, pogs and midnight snow and aftershave and stars and broken office chairs. Today I saw my life for sale on trestle tables long and wide and the people gathered round with sticky hands and pound coin smiles. I wrapped my arms around these things and screamed for resolution but it's gone, I saw them slip away between my fingers like liquid through my hands and I couldn't catch them. New memories push the old away, so I archive them in objects and people's faces because it's just easier that way.

The Painstake

I've been wondering when I will catch your eye, probably never so it's time to force issue on you and make the first move, but wait, am I really going to do this and step over this line knowing that it will raise behind me from the ground like gates to seal me in, there's no going back from this. So I eased into cautiousness and proposed Christmas meetings because maybe our paths could just cross over other commitments. You liked it because it was plausible and so did I, it was an unspoken fact that we noted between us. The place was dark and red and blue and I stuck to the floor by the bar in spilt beer and liquor and the scent was sour and static but you were there and I barely noticed. Memories of four years ago washed away the awkwardness and we toasted to how everything changes but nothing has changed. I really liked your glasses and your ripped jeans and your converse and your badges and the way you painted your nails black like you always did. You were an enigma and I couldn't unravel you or figure you out but we sank all the beer that we could and went out into the night and we were rain smattered and laughing and we smoked the last fags we had under streetlights. I had visions of holding your waist in my hands and it was real and forever and we were magnets. Next there was a "Don't forget to keep in touch" conversation and you were waving at me from behind dusty glass and I was smoking alone on the bleak city street with half a dream lived out and no questions answered, like, what if I was stronger and maybe more sure? Could I have done more to keep you close? Was I a fool just dreaming about these things while all the time you were begging for me to reach out and grab us? The questions are infinate, and was that my chance just gone?

A Short Word on Writing and Hearing

Sometimes my fingertips are hard and they smart when i push them into frets but it's ok. I keep playing out the same pattern and it's one that is perfect from start to finish in my head but when I try to convey it out loud it consists of minor melodies and the rest is just missing pieces, but it's ok. There is always the picture but never the right frame, I keep saying it over and over, but it's ok. Hearing my voice on the scratchy, low-fi recording feels sad and incomplete, but it's ok. There is always the picture but never the right frame.