What about the walkman?

The soundtrack that follows you?

Why do we love music that is loveless. The ballad, that is one thing -- or is that the difficult thing to understand? To sing about a quest, to listen to a song about something romantic, something worth dying for -- that requires an intense belief. Act of faith, commitment. Is that the unusual, unnatural thing?

Think of all those old Bowie songs. Is there the sound of love in Aimee Mann? Mebbe, or mebbe it's just crabby, pinched bitterness and cynicism wrapped in pop.

Television in the far room, dead light upon
My mother's face, dull, colors washed and drained,
Hearing aid shut off, she soaks into the downstairs bed,
In wordless flight from everyday harpies.

Blight and worms have feasted
On the unsprayed peachtree in my father's yard.
He's lost the taste of peaches, wandering, misted
In damp days that have the demeanor of night.

Look out and await the Christmas sun,
Remember the clear days, they did happen.
Amnesiac night is here, some of us are awake.

I read the story of St. Francis to my son, your grandson
The stories break my heart to read
I wish I was an actor, rather than writing this tragedy,
or parody, that's more what it seems like.

Yes, I need to see it as something other than tragedy.
But all I have now is hope -- not conviction, not vision.
I'm lost in stacks of books and alternate routes,
ambiguous directions, half remembered things

The things that always save me, or salve me,
are things like Hamlet's "too solid flesh"
Am I to stand witness by reporting what I see
peripherally? It blinds to see it straight on.

There's too much happening here -- my lack of steady work,
being a forty year old man, wondering where my sense of singing is,
music, those soaring sensations.