I wrote these, for what purpose remains a mystery...

-Great elation takes a leap,

I arrived at this destination too soon.

The beasts of tomorrow glut

themselves on today's fodder.

Ambient noise is the song of

their union.

Let's raze the world in the

comfort of our ignorance.

-Ode to Customers-

Fellow travelers in the channel,

I'll direct your rudder.

Frustration abounds in tones,

I'll set all to right.

We duel with pleasantries,

your's mostly lacking.

You make life a less than

tolerable hell.

From Garrison Keillor, as far as I know, a poem I can't ever remove from memory.

Here on this Summer night

in the grass and lilac smell,

drunk on the crickets and the starry sky.

Oh, what fine stories we could tell,

with this moonlight to tell them by.

Burma Shave

For all the melodies that play across the span of our world, for the lyrics on the lips of dedicated sycophants of musical artists and bards, there are but few songs I truly love.

One late night, early in my adult years I was watching a repeat session of the PBS music program Austin City Limits. It featured Tom Waits shuffling around a prop Filling Station speaking the lyrics to an incredible song, a moving story. He'd glide over and prop his arm up on a pump, a cigarette bearing an impressive amount of ash hung limply in his outstretched hand. He was telling us of two strangers and their chance meeting, of dreams that fall short in tragedy at the feet of their destination. It was marvelous.

I just can't get over that song.

Let me share something with you...

I’ve heard that an artist’s work is a representation of their environment. Like a sponge they soak up all that occurs around them. If this is true, it says some interesting things about history.

Living today in a world of pre-fabricated, plug-in-play conveniences where an environment is a carefully crafted, plastic model of a corporation’s grand design, it’s hard for an artist to escape the fate of becoming derivative. Originality and uniqueness are qualities which evade the glut of today’s “artistes” who are ready to ply the heartless formulas of Pop-Monsters to their modular, tech-nourished, sense-deprived lives in hopes that they, like so many talentless fools before them, can line their pockets with pilfered royalties. How red their grasping claws must be.

We live in an age where the common man is encouraged to whore out his mother, wife, and daughter for a chance to grasp the rich man’s nickel. Shame, for this writer, is a horrific slight of an understatement.