My neighbor is missing!

I've mentioned during my last trip to Kyoto that I took part in an open mic night at Tadg's. Up here in the 'Nog, I feel frustrated at the lack of available outlets to channel creative energy. Occasionally in a drunken pub conversation, someone will talk about starting a writer's circle. Sunday, we finally got it rolling.

Shell talks about some of what went on, about the wine, words, and wraps. She mentions our team-written poems, started with a single line written about the Bevinda CD playing it's mellow, almost operatic fugue. From there, the paper was passed left, a new line written as a "first thought best thought" Beat reaction to seeing only the previous line. Each line is a new writer. Keep in mind none of us saw the complete work until the end. Results are as follows.

The sound makes me sad and sleepy.
I've been sleepy about an hour.
And an hour just kicked my barren brass ass.
I've been stomped and pushed and pulled through the madness of my mind.
But there's no running from myself.
For some people, life is a treadmill.
A hamster -play toy,-but...what can you do!
You can jump off! We must find a movement aligned with our own rhythm and dance it to our own trance.

Cellos used to make me cry.
Silly, sauntering, sandling standards sang silhouettes.
Sounding like cradles of stillness, the cadence of lost souls sang out to us all.
Voices that start at a whisper and build to a thunder between the ears.
It's the difference between the sound of a plane from on the ground and when you're actually in it.
The feeling is almost stifling. I could have eaten a seat, or a neighbor. But instead, I saw sun shrugging.
I fell into the signs of familiarity in order to escape the suffocating stomach-wrenching recycled air.
The constrictions like relief, when I think about the hyper-breath of new life experiences.

Stringed gals ate still chocolate.
The chocolate gave them the sense that they could escape into another life.
Like Charlie and the Golden Ticket, they talk themselves into a sugary universe.
Would that be the Milky Way candy bar?
"Yeah! But, there are only two candy bars left..."
, he said, laughing as a man with too many secrets.
His giggle is a quiet invitation to find the right puzzle pieces.
Laughter is an enigma.

Open arias always remind me of "The Talented Mr. Ripley."
It's a bittersweet snapshot of a man desparate to be someone else.
He could be the "Piano Man" of England.
He definitely had the spin for it.
Kicking and laughing, he sprung forward to something he'd never seen before.
Wide-open spaces spread out before him like an old canvas, white-washed after many years.
The temporal becomes the physical.
And the physically string bean becomes the temporarily the temporal intemperability. (?)


Ok, so they don't have the polish of Burroughsian cut-ups, but alliteration was had by all.


On the turntable: Nouvelle Vague, "Nouvelle Vague"