Poem

Sing to me of artists
Of poets and dreamers
Who live life out loud
And overcome their fears

Sing to me of lives fully lived
Give me their ecstasy
Show me their courage
I will dream I too might be

Sing to me of adversity overcome
Show me the garden in late summer
Don't spare the happily ever after
Show me you believe in forever

The blood on my hands is fresh
I search my body for the source
No abrasions, no cuts, no soars,
I am as I was before

I notice the song has stopped
The singer nowhere to be found
Why doesn't he stay and sing
Stay and calm me down

I need his songs of springtime
Of lovers in full bloom
Get my mind out of this place
Out of this dark room

A voice breaks the stillness
Forced, hushed, and low
The singer staring up at me
His life spilling on the floor

I hold him in that moment
Whispering comfort to his pain
And realize I have killed him
Forcing him to do the same

Lives of Praise - A Song

This is a song I wrote for Crossroads Church in Kansas City, MO. Not quite the same without the music, but I wanted to share the text with you all.

Lives of Praise

Verse:
Spirit, come and fill us up
With your love and tenderness
We’ve come to lift our hearts,
And we’ve come to confess

Our brokenness and our pain

Spirit, open up our eyes
To your beauty and your grace
May we see your reflection
In every stranger’s face
Here today, in this hour
Feel your gentle touch and your power

Chorus:
Tear down the walls
Of our fear and our pride
Help us to live while we’re alive

We offer you our songs
Our grateful hands we raise
We offer up our broken lives of praise

Verse:
Spirit, open up our minds
As we seek to understand
How to live like Jesus
With our feet and our hands

Walk the road you’ve prepared

Spirit, open up our hearts
To a world outside this place
A world of broken lives
In need of your embrace

Teach us, Lord, how to care
With our lives, answer prayer

Chorus:
Tear down the walls
Of our fear and our pride
Help us to live while we’re alive

We offer you our songs
Our grateful hands we raise
We offer up our broken lives of praise

Shoah

Lady Gaga calls to Alejandro over the bar speakers. I sip the thick lager native to this city and admire the scenery. (I will ask her for her number, later). The ceiling fan has outlived its usefulness, as the crisp fall air interjects its presence through the open windows.

Wide, northern dialects explode in words like 'Fahk' and 'bawls,' exclaimed with a religious fervor by the bar patrons. The smell of cigarette smoke rides the breeze and freshens the tavern air.

The young, blond woman in the white button-up sweater runs her finger along the rim of her gin and tonic glass. She tosses me a glance while she flirts with the policeman who is using his uniform to his full advantage.

Beyond the cigarette smoke, the steady flow of steam dances inside the memorial of names and glass with that unspeakable title.

The city lights cast shadows across the asphalt streets and brick sidewalks, painting pictures of exotic animals on the grass. Shadows dance everywhere but on the tall glass memorial, illuminated internally.

Afternoon in Boston

Past the fragmented corners of a Sunday afternoon

Struggling against a night gone too soon

I sit.

I listen.

I talk.

I talk too much.

Bombarded with option and consequence

Sipping tannic acid from a ceramic glass

I sit.

I listen.

I dream.

I don’t dream enough.

More free than I ever have been, and less free every day.

I watch the parade of past present and future pass away

I sit.

I listen.

I wonder.

Do they judge me this way?

Giving over to something new

Something borrowed yet true

This is growth

The present gently taps me on the shoulder

I raise my gaze from this old manila folder

I sit.

I listen.

I smell the roasting coffee

I hear the undergraduate student strumming her guitar

I see the runner smirk judgingly at the parked cars

I sit.

I listen.

I am here and nowhere else.

Elipsis

A friend once told me that I would change the way I brushed my teeth, depending on who else was in the room. I can't deny it. For as long as I can remember, the stage has felt like home for me. Recently, I began considering the implications of my lifelong performer's mentality. This is the problem: as a performer, I'm used to relying entirely on others to point me in the right direction. Artists and audiences build the boxes in which I work, in which I question, in which I work out my meaning. Without these architects, I stand here paralyzed by the sheer scale of what is possible. My analytical brain is so completely overwhelmed by all of the information, by all the options, by all that is possible, that it simply overloads. I need to find some way to close the aperture; some way to process the feedback I'm receiving from this world into some kind of a clear picture.

Last week, I met my family in Jacksonville, Florida. After one of the longer road trips I've had in recent memory, we arrived in Key West: the southernmost point in the United States. Now, aside from the beaches and the general two-pieced scenery I was looking forward to investigating, there was one stop I knew I must make: the Hemingway house. I've always been captivated by Hemingway, not simply by his words, but by the richness and tragedy of the life they reflected. His work is ominous, dark and clear, painting an unforgiving world of basically flawed people, doomed to succumb to the lower angels of their nature. The most tragic ingredient of his work for me, however, is the overwhelming sense I get that there was a time in his life when he believed in the redemption and hope he would so curtly dismiss with his writing. Undoubtedly, his experiences as an ambulance driver in World War I fed this perspective. His string of failed marriages, as well. Still, I came to his old home to seek something unlikely: inspiration.

The tour guide was amusing, offering interesting stories to better illuminate the man's humanity. He showed us the 17th century birthing stool Hemingway used to watch bullfights, purely for the shock-value. He offered an explanation for the 44 six-toed cats who still wandered the premises. He even told stories about his own exploits as a tour guide, in the Hemingway tradition (one particularly hilarious prank involved an Asian tour group and a sleeping cat on Hemingway's bed). Still, most meaningful for me weren't the stories of Hemingway's exploits, but the simple way in which he lived out his tenure on that island. Everyday, he would follow the same routine: up at 6, write until 750 words or lunch--whichever came first, go fishing until happy hour at Sloppy Joe's bar, stumble home to greet whichever celebrity guest his wife was hosting at the time, go to bed and start all over. While at happy hour, Hemingway would draw out the stories of the locals at Sloppy Joe's, remember them, and record them the following morning. These stories would provide him all the fuel he needed to keep producing unforgettable literature. Over half of his life's work was composed during his 8 years in Key West, where his primary sources of inspiration were fish and barroom conversations. I felt so inadequate.

I thanked the tour guide for his stories and for keeping the spirit alive. It's hard to know what to make of my own search for direction in the shadow of such a giant. There was nothing about his life in that Floridian paradice that seemed up to the task of inspiring that great art. He simply worked, fished, and listened everyday, and wrote down what he heard. This was his lens: his aperture. I've decided to try this as well. To take the life that I am living as a community organizing opera singing, theological junkee, and write about what I see, the people I meet, and the stories they tell me. Hopefully, through this offering, I not only draw into clearer focus my own questions, but speak to some of yours as well. I look forward to hearing your stories, and seeing just where this will go...

for You

I've been thinking about you less, lately. It used to be I couldn't get away from you. Everywhere we had been, the things we'd talked about, all of these became apparitions of you. Not the you I could call and speak with today, of course, but the you burned into my memory; the you that might have never existed outside my imagination.

Today, it is easier. I sit on my roof without thinking of the first night we spent here. Without being bombarded by sensation-- scent, touch, taste--that my memory now links to you. I go to that same cafe, even have the same tired conversations with our same old friends (the ones I have now inherited).

I'm moving away, now. While packing up my things, I came across the sweater I had given you that night. Our time together has become so much simpler, so much tidier with the passage of time. You become less you, and more a foil to my own character with each day that passes. You have surrendered your limitless complexity so that you might fit more neatly into my life story. This is called perspective.

I wonder if I have become the same for you. We were only together for a short time, and yet the words we shared were true. So, what have I become to mean for you?

dark cafes

dark cafes in summertime
dark cafes, where people hide
hide from city lights and drink wine
wine to calm busy minds

I live in these dark cafes
where for the price of a tea
they will let me stay;
let me believe I'm free

You found me in such a place
said You'd seen me here before
said that you wrote songs in case
you forgot what it was all for

I write words with melodies in mind
words I plan to sing someday
silly words about the meaning I find
in my little world inside this cafe

maybe I'll sing them for You
show You how beautiful I can be
and You can sing for me, too
show me all the things You see

dark cafes in summertime
where we wait for life to begin
where I sit and write these silly lines
hoping You'll drop in and listen