Tag Archives: loss

Lose or Win: rhupunt

What may begin
as lose or win
soon starts to spin
outside that frame.

It seems like play,
this bob and sway:
a bright display,
almost a game,

a wild careen,
drifting between
two wide extremes,
darkness and flame.

Always the chance
in the day’s dance
any advance
could leave you lame.

Each place you are,
gutter or star,
leaves its own scar.
No point in blame.

Thus every art
contains, in part,
true and false starts.
Each ends the same.

27 APR 2017

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5. Survive love and loss (part 1)

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross said, “The most beautiful people are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.” I first became acquainted with Kübler-Ross my freshman year in high school – quite accidentally, and by osmosis. My freshman English teacher was Joanne Fahey, who also taught an upper-class elective on Thanatology that used Kübler-Ross’ “On Death and Dying” as its primary text. Seeing students with copies and finding a couple of copies in Ms. Fahey’s classroom, I eventually picked it up and read parts of it. I also think Jiddu Krishnamurti’s “Think on These Things” entered by consciousness the same way. I was very lucky to land in Ms. Fahey’s Freshman Honors English class, by the way. As a transfer student (we had just moved from Ohio that summer), by the time I got to pick my first year classes, the Honors classes were full with a long waiting list. I therefore landed instead in David Spaid’s regular freshman English class. It is to Mr. Spaid’s credit that upon reading my first assignment, he pushed to have me reassigned to Ms. Fahey’s class almost immediately. Both of them saw something in me that I certainly took a long time to recognize myself, and I will never forget their encouragement (and often, gentle scolding).

When it comes to surviving love and loss, I suppose everyone feels they’ve had their share. Of course, it’s a very subjective measure in any case. Throughout our lives what we call “love” and what we consider “loss” evolve almost geometrically, and often in directions that make both states probably unrecognizable to us at any other time of life.

When you’re young, love and loss are different from when you’re older. Maybe not different, maybe just profound on a different scale, measured by a different yardstick. When you’ve only had one friend in your short life, losing that friend is monumental – regardless of the reason. When you don’t make friends easily to begin with, a life that involves moving every seven years or so results in a pattern of loss that establishes how you interact and entertain people for the rest of your life. It’s hard to put down roots anywhere when you’ve been repotted several times. You learn to get your nourishment nearer the surface.
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Thoughts on Time and Loss

A conversation yesterday prompted me to think about time and loss in a personal way.

Think about it: as a musician, it seems like one is always surrounded by greatness in terms of performances and songs. Upon close examination, you find yourself watching a recent Neil Young concert documentary where he’s playing songs like “I Am A Child,” “Old Man,” or “Down by the River.” You see the Beatles on TV doing some of their great songs, or Paul McCartney in concert within the past few years, and you hear “Yesterday”, “Let It Be” or “Helter Skelter.” Put on Hank Williams record.

What do these artists and songs have in common? Age.

All the Beatles recordings were made before John, Paul and George were 30 years old. Hank Williams, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Ian Curtis, etc., etc. wrote and performed their best (in some cases, only) work in young adulthood. The Rolling Stones were in their prime in their 20s and 30s. Steve Winwood was 15 to 17, for heaven’s sake, in the Spencer Davis Group.

How does this relate to me, you may wonder?

I’ve been writing songs and playing music since I was eight years old. In the 30+ years since then, I’ve written probably 600 complete songs, composed countless additional melodies, and crafted lyrics for hundreds of songs that are still awaiting melodies. Many of these were captured on fragments of paper, journals, napkins, dozens of cassettes, a couple of CDs, and existed in NO OTHER FORM. It’s the rare song, and usually one from within the past 10 or fifteen years, that exists in digital recording form (MP3) or whose lyrics still exist – usually because I posted this information on my journal.

Thanks to Hurricane Katrina, any extant documentation in written or recorded form is lost forever. That means that my musical output that correlates to that of John Lennon, Hank Williams, Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan from the ages of 8 to 35 may as well have never existed.

Imagine if John Fogerty, for example, had to start at age 40 writing songs and had never composed “Run Through the Jungle”. Or if Jimmie Rodgers had never written “Blue Yodel #5”.

There were some great songs in my younger days. From a perspective that I don’t have anymore. Because I’m 42, not 18 or 23 or 27. I’ll never fall in love for the first time again. Or a lot of other things for the first time. Or be as politically angry and energetic enough to scream about it. Or have a four octave range, for that matter. And just because you may have never heard those songs, doesn’t mean that they aren’t worth missing, or wondering about.

I suppose it’s the equivalent of having spent 30 years writing a 1,000 page manuscript, never making a copy, and suddenly having only pages 899 through 937. How do you recreate it?

How many great songs does a songwriter have? How many poems? Would W.B. Yeats have the same cultural significance if the only thing he could prove he’d written was “The Wild Swans at Coole” or “The Stolen Child”?

I used to think that my legacy would be the documentation of a life in art – from cradle to grave as a writer, musician, philosopher, bard. But instead, I find myself in a kind of reverse Rimbaud. Arthur, you’ll remember, gave up poetry at 19 to become a businessman, and never wrote another verse. I can only prove I started out at about 28. Elvis died at 42 – the age I am now. Where would he have gone had he lived, without having had those years from 17 to 41 documented and memorialized so thoroughly?

So many words, melodies, pictures, and recordings make up a true artist’s magnum opus.

Sometimes I feel as if I’ve suffered a literal and figurative lobotomy.

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Why Things Burn

A moment of brilliance,
shot through the heart and left for dead
on the side of the road;
An instant of insight,
unclouded by the circumstance of reason
as the teardrop explodes;
A spark from a fire
too long extinguished, with no memory
or meaning of flame.
A blink of an eyelid;
unconscious movement without conscience
or the concept of pain.

What is the reason why things burn?

A moment of madness,
illumination that burns through the curtain of dawn;
A second of shadow,
fogging the mirror before it is faded and gone;
An inkling of brilliance,
one shining hour that dies as the minutes decay;
A spark of electric
current that waxes and wanes as it travels away.

What is the reason why things burn?

30 JUL 2007

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The First Day

If this is the first day of what life remains,
who cares if there’s sunshine or thunder and rain?
Both have their own virtues, each pleasure and pain;
though different, a good deal the same.

If this is the first day of what there is left,
what good is my grieving, or acting bereft
because things so far haven’t all gone my way?
What matters is always today.

Yesterday’s always a moment behind,
tomorrow a moment too soon;
hold on too tightly, and you’ll only find
January turns into June.
Each brand new morning is unto itself,
it needs not a calendar name.
Waste just one moment, and your life is past
with no one but yourself to blame.

If this is the worst day to happen so far,
what good is me blaming some unlucky stars
or looking for answers where none need be found
beyond my two feet on the ground?

If this is the best day that will ever be,
what good is it to keep it locked up for me
when part of the reason it turned out that way
is saving tomorrow for after today?

Yesterday’s always a moment behind,
tomorrow a moment too soon;
hold on too tightly, and you’ll only find
January turns into June.
Each brand new morning is unto itself,
it needs not a calendar name.
Waste just one moment, and your life is past
with no one but yourself to blame.

If this is the first day, and what’s come before
is just one more wave on an infinite shore,
which part of creation should I try to blame?
The end and beginning are one and the same.

30 NOV 2006

for James Taylor

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All Those Who’re Lost

All those who’re lost aren’t there from wandering;
some are asleep, and dream of squandering
times and places they’ve not been,
describing wonders they’ve not seen.

All those who’re lost aren’t there by accident;
some choose confusion, it’s self-evident.
They take for granted the status quo
and make decisions to make it so.

All those who’re lost don’t want to be found;
it’s too familiar, their common ground,
the box they dare not step an inch outside:
public opinion and their own sad pride.

All those who’re lost aren’t there from wandering;
just left behind from the army’s plundering
that made a wasteland left in its wake,
its former glories, its grand mistakes.

All those who’re lost aren’t seeking out
an answer to remove all doubt;
they’re building walls to try and close it in:
the truth of where they are and where they’ve been.

All those who’re lost don’t want a map,
unless it puts the world right in their lap;
it’s too much effort to reach the end
and find out you’ve got to begin again.

All those who’re lost aren’t there from wand’ring;
some are asleep, and dream of squandering
times and places they’ve not been,
describing wonders they’ve not seen.

03 AUG 2006

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Nobody Wants to Hear

I could be bitter about all this shit
or at least, start to doubt a benevolent universe;
whine on in rhyme about storm clouds and sunshine
that doesn’t come out ‘cept to drink up the water.

My angst could flower under its own power,
give me at least something to call creativity,
some kind of edifice, beautiful, more or less,
a place to lead willing lambs to the slaughter.

Nobody wants to hear you’re doing fine
Thinking your happiness is just a line
To sell them something which they are inclined
to believe could end any old time

I could be bitter, and perhaps I am;
but Goddamn, what’s the point if your grief isn’t endable?
drown in your own tears, and you die expendible
one more pathetic and troubling statistic.

The blues could cover me beneath a shadow,
give me some shade on these hot summer nights,
some of kind of protection from clear understanding,
but would my demons be more realistic?

Nobody wants to hear that you’re OK
without a care for their cares and dismay
working through your special brand of malaise
seeing both colors and grays.

I could be bitter about how things are;
find a bar serving solace and fade from the light;
sing out the changes in slow minor modes:
let my mood fill darkness around me.

My holocaust could be compared to your own;
let us groan ‘neath these chains here together,
spend our time looking for some life beyond
and pretend it’s all inclement weather.

Nobody wants to know your life is great,
instead pretending we share the same fate,
wanting to think that the reason you’re late
is the same trouble piled onto everyone’s plate.

12 JUN 2006

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