New Song: Soapbox PSA

 

I realized the other day I've been writing an awful lot about my creative process, and have failed to share the actual things I have been recently working on. Here's the complete lyric of my recently finished Soapbox song, a bluesy piano manifesto on why I do not want to be in an open relationship. A sort of PSA to all applicants in the Bay Area. I'll have a demo up in the next week or so. Enjoy!

I like open
open seas and open window panes
how your brown eyes open at my name
I like the jars I never need to bang
on the edge of the table
unsealed without struggle 
Babe I was able 
to stick around and see
what would come from you and me
just don't ask me please
to simply open up my bed

I like complex
long division on the restaurant bill
is just my special kind of skill
I like the 26 ingredients
I'd use to make mole
or lemon curd soufflé
the night of your birthday
I'd rewire your TV
from notes in Portuguese
just don't ask me please 
to make more complex my bed

(bridge)
I don't like your type of enlightenment
I know it would be to my detriment
I already did the experiment 
Monogamy your dreary word
of straight jackets and chains absurd
a caged and captured flightless bird
with feathers clipped and song unheard
But disembodied rhapsodies
hide Peter Pan proclivities
a spiritual mythology 
to rise above biology
its not my practice to unlearn
the wisdom when my stomach turns
my cheeks go flush with endless burn
I won't lose it for this concern    

'Cause I like freedom
Free from nights awake and worrying 
And free from endless processing 
I let the sleeping dogs just lie around
And wake up with out you 
In mornings of clear blue
And baby it's still true
I'll be sad to see
I know you need to leave
as it won't work for me
to trade my freedom for my bed

Leisure/Work

Big conversations Friday on work, art making, money making with my poet friend Silvi Alcivar of The Poetry Store (1). More on that soon, but to tie those thoughts together is my recent find on BrainPickings (2), a luminous quote by one of my heroes, the beloved Brother David Steindl-Rast.

Leisure … is not the privilege of those who can afford to take time; it is the virtue of those who give to everything they do the time it deserves to take. He goes on:

Whenever you work, you work for some purpose. If it weren’t for that purpose, you’d have better things to do than work. Work and purpose are so closely connected that your work comes to an end, once your purpose is achieved. Or how are you going to continue fixing your car once it is fixed?…

In play, all the emphasis falls on the meaning of your activity… Play needs no purpose. That is why play can go on and on as long as players find it meaningful. After all, we do not dance in order to get somewhere. We dance around and around. A piece of music doesn’t come to an end when its purpose is accomplished. It has no purpose, strictly speaking. It is the playful unfolding of meaning that is there in each of its movements, in every theme, every passage: a celebration of meaning. Pachelbel’s Canon is one of the magnificent superfluities of life. Every time I listen to it, I realize anew that some of the most superfluous things are the most important for us because they give meaning to our human lives.

(1)  Silvi and The Poetry Store
(2) Steindl-Rast on Leisure and Gratefulness