Dad, Wine and Baba O'Riley

My dad liked wine

He liked to taste wine, he liked to drink wine and I'm sure he liked how wine made him feel

I do

He also liked classical music

I do

I appreciate wine and my Father's sensibilities...now

But he never appreciated mine

I liked beer, tequila, a line of cocaine and Rock 'n Roll

I wanted to smash my violin across my mom's face

After I played The Who's "Baba O'riley"

Is that art?

But of course I wouldn't

...smash my violin

I loved my violin

I would play the solo violin part of "Baba O'Riley" with headphones on and a head full of THC

My Dad would drink wine and listen to my mom ask if that was music I was supposed to be practicing

And all I could hear was,

"It's only teenage wasteland, it's only teenage wasteland...They're all wasted!"

Today I hear the song and all I can hear is,

"I don't need to be forgiven, I don't need to fight to prove I'm right!"

...and I no longer want to smash my mom's face

And I'm not my Dad!

Ship of a Fool

A wrecked vessel upon a reef of childhood memories lay waste to a voyage beyond

I am the captain with no ship and a faint sadness threatens to crumble my snottiness into tears

Fortunately I can stand

It's shallow... and if it were not, I can swim

But scared of open water

The abysmal depth of dark, brackish and cold waters I have felt have been satisfying

I seem to enjoy those non metaphorical bodies of liquid although I'm scared while crossing

Now I stand grounded upon an uncharted, bony reef

Stuck!

It's time to swim

And I realize I was captain to no crew

I never needed a fucking ship

I was always told I needed one

What a fool I've been

Light Wind Tashiba

The Splinter

The splinter beneath my skin makes me feel bad today

A rash has broken through my facade as I try to heal from my old ways

All my appetites are back and it itches like crazy

I'll try not to be lazy

Maybe the ceiling will collapse on me and fall through the floor into dirt

The dark hurt

The dusty place of the heart when revealed breathes easy

Freeze me

Until a time in which I can be cured

Reassured...

They tell me it's just a spilnter

The only problem is that they've never had one

Not like this

I've forgotten how to kiss

And all they can say is...

Fill in the blank

Because we have all heard the stupid fucking words

...and the splinter continues to fester

Good Morning Man

The Good Morning Man rests his head upon the pillow and burns the timbers of his mind

As sunrise lights a color of fire on his cheek chafed with time

The Good Morning Man moves his fingers stiffly upon his joints and cracks the limbs in two

As morning air fills his nose...an aroma of new

'More to work with today than yesterday' as the Good Morning Man likes to say

He's awakened the dawn of responsibility

Expanding dreams a possibility

And beyond the daydreams?

Darkness and sleepy scenes of burning forests of imagination

Fresh will be the soil of a brand new world

Good night Good Morning Man, good night 

Live and Die On Your Birthday

I welcome the newcomers with some advice

Don't live your life according to a plan, but plan on having friends and family

Wander about aimlessly for awhile and make some mistakes

I did

If you, newby, asked me how to live

I would tell you how to die

For the answer to life lay in the heart of the brave who understand that you live and die on your birthday

Leave the world headfirst...as you entered

Never be dragged by your feet and refuse to crawl

And always, always share your heart

Leave it behind for others so that you may travel light

And I always believed that some good last words would be "Happy Birthday! "

My brother had a globe of the world in his room when I was growing up and when he wasn't home I would sneak into his sacred space, knowing he would kick my ass if he ever found out, and I would locate my home near San Francisco then spin the globe, stop it randomly and wish I was there.

Right where it stopped I'd find myself in another world within a world. Mongolia, Russia, Argentina, Java would stop below my pointed finger and more often my finger pointed to the middle of some ocean or sea. I understood the globe was covered mostly with water but what fascinated me was what was it like in the middle of the ocean. And it fascinates me today and probably will till I die.

I've never been more than a 125 miles offshore, out of sight of land. So, I have a pretty good idea of what it literally looks like, but the thought of being thousands of miles from any point of land feels like freedom. Not the comfortable, familiar freedom that one feels when leaving work or going to recess at school, but the insecure uncertain scary freedom that maybe a child feels when learning to swim when they push off the wall into the deep end for the first time. That's a freedom most of us forget about. The "fuck it, here I go" freedom. 

I will cross an ocean to get to the other side because I want to grow up.

I don't want to play in the shallow end anymore.

I want to be a grown up without a job, responsibilities or dependents.

A selfish man on a quest to find himself in the middle of the ocean like some foolish aquatic astronaut looking into the vast open space, using celestial bodies to guide him away and toward a shore faraway. 

I will arrive tired and weary.

I will sleep and dream in this foreign place. I will be an alien of a different skin color.

I will speak another language and they will ask where I'm from and I will point to the sea. 

They will understand.