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Tuesday, May 02, 2017

Trance

Nightly
I sit in the cool spring air,
rocking back and forth
on the patio swing,
trying to put myself
into a trance.

I inhale
the cannabis vape,
and play the recording
of Liz Damon’s Oriental Express
singing “1900 Yesterday.”

I am drawn
to this hopelessly dated
recording,
anachronistic for 1971,
it must seem positively
prehistoric now.

“Where's the love 
that we knew, 
is it gone, 
or have you 
thrown it away?”

Something about
those voices,
that 1960’s Hollywood sound,
takes me back
to my earliest memories
of something beautiful,
someone unblemished.

I perform this ritual
hoping one day
it will be
the key
that unlocks
who I really am,

who I really was
before the crash.

[Written and posted for the Tuesday Platform at the Real Toads.]

11 comments:

  1. I wonder if the music that can pull back our senses.... or do we have to go on...

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  2. Ahhh... love that sound. Love this scene, contemplative. I rather like who you really are, at least here in these pages. :)

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  3. I LOVE this poem!!! Seriously, it's one of my favorites. Excellent line breaks; you control the reading SO well.

    "I sit in the cool spring air,
    rocking back and forth
    on the patio swing" ... This sounds gorgeous; I would love to spend my evenings this way.

    "and play the recording" ... This made me think of "re-cording" ... reattaching the umbilical cord, so to speak. You're longing for your mommy, I think. That safety and warmth. That safe place.

    "takes me back
    to my earliest memories
    of something beautiful,
    someone unblemished" ... See, this (to me) describes our mothers ... the way we see them when we first come out and for those first few months/years, before we learn that they are flawed humans like everyone. Until then, we see them as perfect, infallible, incapable of letting us down or every "dropping us," so to speak. It's an awful feeling when we learn that our mommies can't hold us forever but that we have to learn to hold ourselves ... and then maybe get married and get our spouses to hold us.

    It's a lonely world, isn't it? :(

    That ending, good golly. That was phenomenal!

    Keep writing, little one.

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  4. This is so incredibly poignant!

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  5. If you find the answer, Mosk, could you share it? Put it, into a book, to offset your research expenses, with the loyalties, you have earned, from said book.

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  6. The power of music to take us back to pllaces we don't want to go... or don't know how. Lovely.

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  7. Music is medicine for sure.

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  8. Delectable music! And the nightly trance sounds very pleasant – until the startling ending.

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  9. Music is a powerful force in our lives. Beautiful poem, B.

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  10. Music can open so many doors, give so many answers... Love the mellow beat of these lines.

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  11. Anonymous3:59 PM

    This feels like I'm a watching a movie--a dark violently vivid evening of you rocking there, smoking, and the music. I picture staticky like viola (?) sound, smoke around boyish eyes, and then that line, that killer line--"...that unlocks who I really am" and the man in the poem comes through the eyes and into the reader's face. Fan-fucking-tastic. My favorite of yours.
    Amy

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