I got lucky. Just as the poetry/lyrics I'd been writing became inadequate in the expression of new feelings, I was introduced to two wonderful books of poetry. The first was actually a radical re-introduction to the poetry of the Old Testament (The Psalms, Job, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, etc). The second was "The Dream of the Poem", which is a book of Hebrew poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, from around the turn of the 1st Century, translated into English by Peter Cole. Everything is changing for me, and those two books have singlehandedly (doublehandedly?) made it possible for my music to keep up with that change. Here's part of a song I'm working on:
Retrointrospection
I.
My facial features,
my dusty mannerisms, with
the emotional space I
never understood
have been shaken,
like
oil and
water
that never
settles.
II.
Alloyed, ancestral sense abandoned,
I clothe myself
in rainfall.
This is constantly changing as I write and modify the song. Still, it's a good example of what I see as a kind of mixture of the more narrative stuff I used to write and the really heavily image-based stuff I've been writing for the past year-ish.
It's an uneasy, dramatic, confused, chaotic, uncontrollable, skittish, and very personal exploration.
I'm standing near a line I remember drawing, safely, from the other side.
