City of Legends

Having been lured into submitting Strange…but Beautiful into a song contest, I have now decided to go out on a limb and submit a song to the John Lennon Songwriting Contest.

There’s just one teeny, tiny problem.

I can’t decide which song from my CDs (or soon to be released CDs) to submit.

Should it be

• Strange…but Beautiful? Lovely and well done…
• Darfur (Jesus Wept)? Social conscience, world music instrumentation…
• The Taste? Seductive and sweet…
• The Right Set of Lips? That would be nice…

Lord, I can think of ten others that might compete….somebody help me! If you have a strong opinion ABOUT ONE OR MORE PARTICULAR SONGS OR TRACKS, leave a comment.

In other news….finished preliminary inventory of how many and of what titles of my books and CDs will be hitting the road with me this summer. Sheesh…I need a forklift. Or a roadie. More than 200 books, about that many CDs. Yes, this tour will be the answers to many people’s prayers, as I am not anticipating surviving it. Just a question of whether my heart or luck gives out first. I am tired in ways I can’t even comprehend, but committed to one last drive beyond the point of endurance.

But I’ll be going out on MY terms. Thomas says we should call this the "Couer Rage" tour. Nope. But it would make a good title for a book.

I wrote a poem, once. I know I have written more than one, but this one in particular. It had something to it. A certain self-possessed truth. An enigmatic quality to it, as though I had painted the Mona Lisa with words.

I lost it.

I don’t remember where I put it, whether in an email or a discussion board or a blog of a friend. I can’t even remember the name of the poem, just that it sang. It spoke to me and for me and told the truth, which is what all great art aspires to. Not to excuse or promote, but to reveal.

I was talking to an old friend yesterday, a brave one who knows things about me that she doesn’t mind remembering, and I told her I was pleased with a few of my works of late. She laughed, that Southern Belle laugh she gives that reminds me of Holly Hunter (yes, it was Karla Sasser, the Mad Gypsy), and said "You’ve written a lot more than a few good poems".

And, you know, she was right. The funny thing is, I have never lied in a poem. I have lied in explaining what this poem or that poem was about, to save feelings or face, or to spare myself the wrath of someone who lives in this land where we have the right to arm bears.

But to lie in a poem? What’s that about? I just can’t imagine writing anything of any value that wasn’t true.

I’m not about obscuring the moment, excusing the faux pas, gilding the lily. As I read back over the thousands of works in my catalog, I see truth around every corner. I see truth on every square of every sidewalk. I see truth in every window and on every cobblestone of the street (yes, the streets in my mind are made of cobblestones, do you have a problem with that?)

Yes, I know sometimes I sink beneath my own gravitas. No one is more annoyed by that than me, as the average…Hell, even most of the extraordinary people I have been honored to meet, they are not equipped to deal with it. Then I become concerned that I have overspoken myself. Not misspoken, as every word is true, but said too much and overloaded the collective, subjective or singular synapses in the mind(s) of the reader(s).

It makes friends of enemies, lovers of friends and enemies of lovers, or so my friend Dave said…almost 30 years ago.

So, if you have seen me lately laying low, it is because the work I am writing is true. It is full of anguish and loss, pain, love, passion, commitment, fear, rage, joy, hope and something to do with the cooling bars of a cage. I just don’t think the world is best served by having to read it, to have it up in their grill. Most people prefer life at lower speeds, gentler volumes and temperatures they are sure they can survive. Me, I like it raw and real and true and natural and in the millions of degrees Kelvin. It gets lonely in that place, but it is where I belong.

Like Nic Cage said in Moonstruck, "Life ain’t perfect".

Rust never sleeps. With the right fuel and a good vector this final burn might last 30 more years. That’s a long time in poetry years. But it is going to be the most exciting time of my life. I had my doubts, not so long ago, but then I asked myself what my personal heroes would say.

Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi, Teddy Roosevelt, John Lennon and Nelson Mandela. They’d all say to me to get off my ass.

John Lennon said "All you need is love" and was gunned down by a deranged fan (makes you wonder what a deranged critic would do). Teddy Roosevelt gave a long political speech while bleeding "like a bull moose" from an assassin’s bullet. Gandhi got to hang with Tagore. Mandela went through unimaginable deprivations and came out the other side unembittered. Jesus, well, there was that bit with the cross, but all in all…

I’m writing a lot. Most of it "file 13" venting, but I am writing. There are many things in this world that I would like to change, and people keep telling me that I have the power to change things. Let’s see if, in the words of an old girlfriend, it truly is that "Where there’s a William, there’s a way" (Karla didn’t say that, it predates her by two decades).

I wrote a poem once.

It died, somewhere, from my ignorance and arrogance and ineptitude.

But I will write another. To honor it, and all the lost souls, broken hearts and dreams of the damned.

I’m not dead yet. Or damned. Just finding my way.

Well, I have new respect for Jared Leto.

Why? I am sympatico. I hear for his latest film he had to gain 65 pounds to play Mark David Chapman, the killer of John Lennon. Then, he took the weight off. And developed gout.

As someone who has confronted this crippling pain since I started losing weight, I understand what he is going through. Usually it strikes the big toe. For me, it hits the second and third toes of my left foot, feeling like a sharp piece of glass is being driven through them with every step or flex of the toes. A doctor told me I had three options: Put the weight back on (screw that), live with the pain or go on a prescription medicine that, I am told, once you start you are on for life.

I’ll deal with the pain. If you see me limping, don’t feel too sorry for me. It’s just pain. I have pushed through pain before. Poets are supposed to live with pain, it is ennobling.

So, Jared, hang in there.

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I stand at the edge of a great abyss.

The wind is fiercely cold at my back, pressing ever so subtly for me to

leap

but the runner of the cliffs of the human heart and soul is no fool.

Or, perhaps, just an unusual one.

I have been asked by the shadows to defend. This is not the first time I have been called upon to defend an article of my faith, nor the darkest. I have, in past times, won my case for God, and lost it for truth, only to win it later. I have spoken for integrity and for temperance, and even self-denial, for sacrifice, for charity.

And now, for love.

To speak with clarity, one must step to the lip of the world and look down upon the stars, an infinite voyage you would never fall to, as there are forces that would grind you to dust before you ever laid eyes on a single world beyond this sphere.

It is an humbling moment. Humbling and cold. The preamble asked of happiness.

Am I happy? I defended the argument of yes, the other day, to a friend, stating that happiness is not a binary station, but a scale, a range of answers. I am, for the most part happy.

But, I am not.

I feel the crust of my exile, every day, like a bone spur in the heel of a runner, digging in ever time I

step

forward to think and feel and seek and believe.

Jade says I am like Sisyphus, happy in my purpose. She is right, in part, being an archetype is rewarding, to a point.

To a point, but not to the point.

So let us barter for life, for love, for faith, for dreams.

What would I have that I do not have? I can’t answer that. I know the answer, but it would open a gash in my last defenses, rendering me a simple target in a world of moving images. A big and bright red dot, as big as the sky.

I have always been a machine, complex and chaotic and mad and elegant in design, perhaps, but a machine. A perpetual emotion machine, requiring a fuel to drive me, able to, at least for a season, make love out of nothing. But I am exposed as hollow when the veil is pulled aside and my creative bride proves to be wax or wood or even illusion.

I am the Amomancer, a dancer of words. A weaver of romances. One who kisses jasmine incense and paints runes of fire and sweat in heated strokes of an arcane brush, dipped in hunger and belief.

I do not know where I left the boy I was was, the man I became. Somewhere down the road, I was not looking when the transfiguration overtook me and I had overlooked the price, even though I had warned and warmed myself on the precognitive mythology of the coming change.

What are the shadows? Facets of the mind, of the soul, of the heart. Art comes from conflict, and I have spun tapestries immortal with the aid of these jesters of pain. One shadow seeks stagnation, mediocrity. The other seeks to feed with no concern for those who could be harmed. The former seeks only to fit in, to be one of the herd. The latter wants to feed on the herd.

I can’t be either. I tried the first suit of flesh on for a time, willing myself dead to live amongst the orchids while I dreamt of roses. The pain of shedding that skin drove me to the other, and I lost my moral compass. While not as evil as I could have become, I allowed myself to take a path of rationale. Excusing my sins of, mostly, omission with an omniscient eye that recorded all for my own mockery. I watch bits and pieces of it, every day, with a heavy heart.

I have a friend who the other day said that if his wife died, he’d kill himself. I told him I envied him. I shocked myself with that revelation. I have been so often disappointed by conditional and feeble loves in my life that to love someone so much again, that I could not survive their passage from this sphere, oh that would be a delight.

"Give me this or I won’t love you anymore, help me do this or I don’t love you."

What kind of graceless, spineless, soulless species are we the children of? We are and need to be better than that.

I defend love as…an echo.

The fact that you hear an echo does not mean it is not a real sound, shaped by the forces that reflected it form its original source. Love is a reflection of our world, both the seen and the unseen. I have loved those who did not love in return because that is a part of love, just as God loves even those who denies God’s very existence. I still have the passion, the hunger, the heart, the mind, the craft, the soul, the heat, the light, the warmth, the strength to love. I will love with my words, my thoughts, my heart, my hands, my plans, my actions, my flesh. The wind fades.

So what of me, now? This world is not a lucid dream, but I am a lucid dreamer. I have before taken flight to end a fall in a dream.

I choose to take point and throw myself from the precipice. Because I choose love and thus embrace sorrow, pain, joy, lust, sacrifice and the occasional mockery. I’ll eat onions, even thought I do not like them, if they are in the way of a steak. I’ll take some sadness if it means I still get love, even if it is just I get to give love. There will be shadows and scrapes and tears and kisses and broken hearts and broken promises and broken minds and burnt words. But love is, in and of itself, immutable. Ask John Lennon. Ask Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Ask Jesus. (There’s three people rarely caught on the same street corner.)

I will continue to love and to seek love, because,

from the beginning and in the end,

that is my nature.

To love. And that is who I am.

The Amomancer.

"All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality."

"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

"It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important."

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

"I submit to you that if a man hasn’t discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live."

"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."

My own commentary: I think if one person, one person in ten thousand, read these words, took them into themselves and made them part of their day to day life, we would transform this world in ways beyond imagining.

Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed was all that was required to throw a mountain into the sea.

Saint Paul said: Three things remain - Faith, hope and love.

Imagine what hope the size of a mustard seed could accomplish.

Imagine what love the size of a mustard seed is capable of.

John Lennon said: Imagine.

"So this is Christmas…"

or so goes John Lennon’s Christmas song’s opening line. I always considered it a touch cyncal until I ran face to face with what is my all-time favourite Christmas song:

Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s "I Believe in Father Christmas" (okay, the incredible Pete Sinfield wrote the lyrics…but just as Elton John gets 99% of the glory for Bernie Taupin’s lyrics, the performer, here, takes the stage).

If you’re not familiar with it, dig it up. It’s a beautiful piece of music and the lyrics have meaning today. I don’t agree fully with the sentiments, but it does embrace the fact that we are somewhat hypocritical and dishonest in this season.

"They said there’ll be snow for Christmas
they said there’ll be peace on Earth
But instead it just kept on raining
a veil of tears for the virgin birth"

I once had an argument with an associate over the fact that I raised my children not to believe in Santa Claus. My first wife made the case, and rightly so, that when we lie to our children, even in fun, we are setting a dangerous precedent, one that allows them to ignore our later exhortations to stay away from dangerous things and to believe in the things we believe in, freely.

"They sold me a dream of christmas
They sold me a silent night
And they told me a fairy story
’till I believed in the Israelite"

That stanza sums up that note. How can we, straght-faced, lie to our Children about Santa Claus and then expect them to trust us regarding even something as important and essential as our very religious beliefs? The associate I was arguing with said that by teaching children to believe in Santa Claus at an early age, we were giving them the ability to believe in something they couldn’t see, but that was real, like Jesus.

That is so wrong-minded in so many ways. Broken trust is broken trust. And I, for one, do not think Jesus and Santa Claus are, at the core, similar in terms of the nature of their existence.

"Hallelujah, Noel
Be it Heaven or Hell
The Christmas we get we deserve."

The final line of these lyrics is so jarring. I think we, at Christmas, usually get better than we deserve, just as we, in faith, get a better deal from God than we deserve.

Merry Christmas, everyone. May you get a better Christmas than you deserve and may the New Year bring you a clearer path and great peace.

In the middle of watching Monday Night Football one December’s night years ago, I heard Howard Cosell announces that John Lennon had been shot and killed.

I didn’t know what to say…there are a handful of moments in your life that you know where you were when you got some news.

For me those were:

President Kennedy’s assassination
The Challenger Explosion
John Lennon’s killing

That’s it…I can’t even say for sure I recall the exact moment when man first walked on the moon with the same clarity.

The greatest compliment I have ever been paid by a colleague wasn’t when they compared me or my writings to Donne or Blake or Poe or Byron…it was when Deborah Atherton compared me to John Lennon in an offhand comment. I had such respect for his humour, his intellect and his spirituality (yes, spirituality…not something you normally associate with the man, but he had, I believe a very intimate spirituality, one he didn’t share with people because of how prized it was to him).

Anyway, John. We miss you. This world isn’t perfect, but you gave us a little nudge in the right direction.

Imagine what we could accomplish if we’d listen, just once, instead of killing each other.

When Odyssey’s men were to pass by the island of the Sirens, he had wax poured in all their ears so they could not hear the song they sung what drew sailors to their deaths. But, curious man he was, he first had them strap him to the mast, with instructions that, until they were out of sight of the island, no matter how fiercely he struggled or gestured, they should not unlash him.

He knew what was coming and set impediments, or at least warnings and wards, in his path.

The next week is going to be pretty stressful on me, so I want to get in my licks now, before the stresses malform me for a brief season. Don’t worry, no matter how freakish my attitudes will be over the next eight or nine days, I will be fine…if my flesh endures so shall my spirit, which was always made of still sterner stuff than my bulletproof form.

Tomorrow is August 12. Big deal you say? Not for me. For a half decade my soul was merged and made strong by my union with Nancy, whom I have called Psyche and the Electric Lady in my works. August 12 is her birthday. There is only one more sacred day on my emotional calendar than that, November 1. And she and I know the import of that day. Tomorrow will be a day of sorrows and celebration. Last I heard she was well and happy. I hope this year finds her thus as well.

August 14 was the day we used to celebrate together, as it is the midpoint between her birthday and mine. Romantic, no? It made sense to us as it signified that we were no longer two people, but one joined destiny. That will also be rough for me.

August 16th draws nigh. Elvis died on that day. But, more importantly for future generations, that is my birthday (yes, I know I share it with Madonna, Frank Gifford and some former daytime hostess…woo-woo…). I turn the big 5-0 this year (me, Mel Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, Kevin Costner and Bruce Willis are all in a twelve month span, from what I understand…I’d like to have Gibson’s money, Willis’ physique, Thornton’s ex wife, and Costner’s…er…well, we can’t have it all…). This will be the first in many a year since I have been in a relationship, even last year I had Ann making (I am sure under the table) assurances that the separation would be over soon (usually followed by a reque$t of some sort or other), and she called on my birthday. I don’t expect that from her this year. And last year I did not hear from my daughter (this was the first real sign that she had grown mute to my existence). We shall see if either of them steps up this year. If not, Matthew 10:14 comes to mind.

Then comes the 17th, speaking of that Bible verse, and I am to speak as part of "Arts Week" in Morgantown. I would rather face a room full of strangers than a crowd where there are friends and family looking at me. The one exception was the assembly at St. Mary’s School in Salinas. Having a few hundred beautiful, well-groomed, uniformed Catholic schoolgirls file in to listen to you is something of a Kevin Smith nightmare (or wet dream, or both). It marked the only occasion in my life an audience has ever intimidated me. Of course, woman have always been my Achilles heel, I guess we know what I was held by when dipped in the River Styx. Ouch.

I may be going to see the boys on the 18th. That is always stressful to me. And, with my new work schedule, it is complicated to do.

And then, on the 19th, I am one of the guests for "Malt on the Mon"…one of the first local tests of my celebrityhood. If this was LA or New York, no problem, I know the crowd I’d get and their timber…this is different. But it’s cool, I probably need a cold shower for my ego, the new book is just too magnificent…for the first time in my existence I am producing packaged material as good as I know I can…of course, my psych profile tells me now I have to step up and not just hit home runs, but screaming line drives that decapitate the pitcher on their way up and out of the stadium, leaving a flaming trail agaianst the gloaming skies.

Excelsior.

Now, you know some of the stresses I am facing (that combined with having a daytime gig at Teletech where I make a salary about 1/5th what I am used to making, but I am surrounded everyday by dozens of charming, intelligent and beautiful women, so there’s that)…so please, if next week I miss a deadline, or babble, or type in all caps one entry, excuse my humanity. I have come to accept that fact that in some ways, humanness is not something most of my readers expect from me.

I am often reminded of Deborah Atherton’s statement, upon meting me, after having know me online for a while, that she was "expecting Charlton Heston, but got John Lennon"…to this day it remains one of the sweetest compliments I have ever received, on so many levels. By the way, check out the information on her opera about Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (the young woman who wed Percy Bysshe Shelley and wrote "Frankenstein") at this link The Mary Shelley Opera. You’ll find it remarkable, as the woman who co-wrote it is.

I digress. As always. I have a book to go work on. You, get on with your life or go viisit my website and drop me a line about a work or two, I always like comments…and, if you have a sister…

I was talking with my Dad this morning and he asked me if I’d heard from my kids yet today (hey, it is still early) and I told him not yet, and I wasn’t holding my breath.

In the course of the discourse that followed, I offered odds on whom I might hear from today. Pretty brutal odds. For those old enough to understand and make their own decisions, it is a statement, not of my character, but of theirs. THE FOUR AGREEMENTS taught me to quit worrying about what misapprehensions, misinterpretations and lies are said of me, as I cannot change what people are doing and it is a statement of their character, not mine, when they say, do and believe such things.

On a lighter note: My brother, Mark, showed me the video for Styx’s take on the Beatles “I Am The Walrus”…they sounded almost like they were channelling the Beatles, except their lead singer sounds more like Harrison than Lennon. I liked the bit cameos by Billy Bob Thornton in the vid. I think someone once told me that myself, Thornton, Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson and Kevin Costner are all within a twelve month span of each other, age wise.

Let me see…Costner did WATERWORLD, Willis is reputed to have dated Lindsay Lohan, Gibson has the pressure of having to follow up THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST, Thornton gets to start almost every interview by being asked questions about his ex-wife (ANGELINA JOLIE). All in all, I’d have to say I’m the luckiest one of the bunch.

I got a note from a reader who wanted to see more pictures of me…okay…here’s three…

The first two were taken in the past year, both when I had my mustache…which I have removed again…don’t know if I’ll bring it back for the GMAF…the third is an old shot of me (in a dress), taken when I was 5. My Mom is a seamstress and I was about the same size at the time as my cousin, Darlene…so she put the blasted thing on me to check the fit…and Dad grabbed the camera. Note how happy I look.

Note I am about 30 pounds lighter than I was in the first two…and substantially taller than in the third

Also, the haircut you see on third one…that was pretty much how I wore my hair until 8th grade…nowadays when you see hair like that on a guy he’s either a gang member, a druggie, or a wannabe.