5/11/15

corpse on boogie street



Been weepy for a while now.  
Driving back from Asheville today, again getting teary with
Bon Iver 
Flume, Creature Fear, Blindsided, Skinny Love* 

and 
Leonard Cohen 
Back on Boogie Street, The Future, Everybody Knows


Bon Iver, Flume: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuQrLsTUcN0
Only love is all maroon  
Lapping lakes like leery loons
Leaving rope burns, reddish ruse


Only love is all maroon  
Gluey feathers on a flume  
Sky is womb and she's the moon

Leonard Cohen, Boogie Street: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rswKZ0PNY_0
So come, my friends, be not afraid  
We are so lightly here 
It is in love that we are made 
In love we disappear 
Tho' all the maps of blood and flesh 
Are posted on the door 
There's no one who has told us yet
What Boogie Street is for.
Leonard Cohen, The Future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FzM_XrgtPo
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions 
Won't be nothing 
Nothing you can measure anymore 
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world 
Has crossed the threshold and it has overturned 
The order of the soul
I've seen the nations rise and fall 
I've heard their stories, heard them all 
But love's the only engine of survival 
****
Facebook these days has become a scrolling wall of words and memes—written by people other than the person posting. I feel like we're all the Great OZ hiding behind a curtain of cliches, political statements, and billboards!

Now I've just done it too. Sort of. So thank you Leonard Cohen and Bon Iver!

Why don't we just say what we think and feel? 
Because it gives us some distance from our thoughts and emotions, and poetry (one's own or someone else's) often reveals deep truth through obliquity. Add a non-verbal element like music and we're goners lost somewhere in the beauty and sadness of our hearts.


Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
 Won't be nothing 
Nothing you can measure anymore
Things are changing, beginning, ending. Death is on my mind, ego and physical death. My difficult, charismatic brother may be dying. I long to truly connect with him as we have only scarcely and rarely done. When I see him next, in a a few weeks, it might be for the last time.

And what remains of my wanting, striving ego is hanging on by its cuticles.

It takes so much energy to support that scrolling wall of illusion, that self-important meme, and only by getting lucky and dropping the curtain do I realize what a burden it is to maintain. As a bonus punch to self, age is humbling, and we either accept or fight it. Very simple. This I know is true: humility is a corollary of time's inexorable goose step and one for which I am genuinely grateful.


lost in my heart
a mournful howl
gone gone goner


And this too is yoga

metta 



*thanks to KP for sending a CD with Flume on it some time ago


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