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