Letters From The Sky

I’d rather sing than write the words deep inside my soul.

It would be easier to paint out colors raging underneath this skin and bones.

The safe thing would be to make some kind of bittersweet melody on a piano crackling and breaking and never once articulating any sort of immediate truth behind it.

Yet the words and the paragraphs and the endless pages are the pasture I’ve been put to run in. So I run around like some kind of wild Mustang. Running free or perhaps trying to simply be set free.

The nouns and verbs say something—they always have to. The adjectives and all those other wonderful sort of words all fill in the blanks. Metaphors and similes and illusions and statements and anything and everything say it all and more even when I don’t know half of what I really want to share. But I share and share.

A painting is on a canvas that usually stands in front of you. A film is a small business venture of creative people on an ambitious mission but still is usually only two hours long. A song is usually only three or four minutes long. A snapshot is color or black and white and regardless of whatever size it might be it’s single and solitary and at an absolute stand still. But writing can go on. And on. And on. And on.

And on.

Sometimes I’d like to hide in a chorus and a verse. To bury myself in the confides of the paint. To pause it all with a photograph. To be a part of a crew that can all take the blame or accept the credit. Yet the words are all I have to use and they always seem to give me away in whatever way they can.

There are so many—too many—to use. Yet I often find myself grasping at the same old words and phrases and stories. Thus giving it all away. Revealing more of myself than I’d ever really want to.

Love looks like a million different things in one’s life. Fireworks centered toward the sky and the laughter behind little running feet and the peace standing still next to a river and the bubble drifting across the family room that you can’t quite pop. Love doesn’t have a shape or a color or a sound or a set of words since it is truly infinite. Yet you keep trying to sum it up in your clumsy little ways for all to see.

The self-deprecation can be seen through. The casual, care-free commonness can be suddenly questioned. This persona that’s offered up like some kind of actor can suddenly searched on a website to see which actor you’re playing.

Letters from the sky litter my back yard in the middle of the day and late at night. I pick them up and wonder what they’re doing addressed to me. But usually I’m compelled to share them in whatever fashion and form I can.

This is the form.

The T and the H and the I and the S. Spelling one simple word. This. And then I keep going. Word after word. With so many more choices than can ever be imagined. A million-plus words full of meaning and certainly meandering and sometimes moving and sometimes simply . . .

Me.

Simply me. Trying to somehow figure out these things I really want to say.