Heartbeat

                                                

Tonight I went to a jazz show starring one of my boys, as he likes to call it when we’re off smoking in the woods together in secret like little kids, and he’s up on stage looking fly in an orange tie and concentrating, or maybe looking like he’s concentrating, but not concentrating on the music, and I’m in the front row with a wide smile on my face knowing all of these possibilities all the time. His boy, this kid I don’t know as well but still well enough to be my boy, maybe, he’s drumming and has a solo and that stuff makes me soar in the hang-gliding falcon Amelia Earhart sense of the word. I’m off in the dark cold wilderness and every beat is a bright shining light on the path and I’m smearing blue and orange and green and pink on a canvas, the notes off my boy’s bass guitar are the colors and the drums are the light. And then there’s the dark, mean and grumpy and full of misery, inflicting the fear of centuries of predator fangs. But there’s also the noise noise noise noise noise noise that humans make as we play rhythm guitar or sneeze or scratch ourselves—is it real, though? Or just a way of passing through the night? Jesus, the fundamental terror of silence, of nothing absolutely nothing there, of absolutely white-wall bleach kind-of nothing, this is what death must be like, and if death is silence than lord knows music is life. Lord knows noise is life, squirming and wrestling and pushing against the primordial ooze, noise is the sound of industrial rust capitals and dust yellow hillsides and ceramic coffee mugs and violins and microphones and leather and tongue clicks bird calls railroads tennis courts and and worst of all the inside of my bathroom, inside of my head, the noise tells me I’m alive. Hmbm. Hmbm. Hmbm. Heartbeat goes hmbm. I’m alive. But even still, I wonder-- is it such a good thing if all I crave is silence?

Originally written May 19th, 2011.