Open D Tuning and Poetry

sitting here listening to some wonderful guitar playing by Michael Hedges who's open D tuning and fusion chords have always served as my own personal acoustic Prozac. while i am doing this i am smiling to myself because one of the things i missed about life in America is access to fairly inexpensive CD's and here in Italy they often cost as much as your first born male child and now that i am sure that the RIAA isn't going to have me arrested for file sharing i can get some of the things i missed via the internet.

at least so sayeth Judge Ginsburg who writes......

"It is not the province of the courts, however, to rewrite the DMCA in order to make it fit a new and unforeseen internet architecture, no matter how damaging that development has been to the music industry or threatens . . . the motion picture and software industries."

i feel a little less leery about swapping files and so i have spent the wet and rainy afternoon jumping from link to link exploring some new things and becoming entranced yet again by this artist and cursing the fates that he died before i really had a chance to get to know his music. why is it so much of the music i like comes from performers or singer-speakers who are dead? i mean really, if i just tick off a few of my favorites, Hedges, Bob Marley, Eva Cassidy, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Jimmi Hendrix...... their are all dead and gone. which brings me to that melancholy....... what will i be remembered for mood......and so i start tinkering around with this poem a friend and I are writing that i just cannot seem to stop tweaking and pretty soon it is going to be unrecognizable......


As a child
I measured my calamities with rolled up pant legs.
often picking,
absentmindedly
at some freshly-made gash.

“I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours!”
I challenged Hector at recess.
And with nervy arrogance
I’d smile at each criss-crossed scrape,
tracing the red raised road maps of blackberry briars,
or the grey green bruise that spread upon my knee.

Back then
My tumbles and spills were only written on the surface of my skin.
I still remember the feel of his moist breath on my breasts,
listening to my chest as we played doctor.
Like those childish kisses momma’s magic lips gave,
I was so sure she could mend the world and all its ills.

and somehow
his gentle ministrations made me feel better,
perhaps even loved.

Maybe it is for that reason, I turn to you now?
the denial of my illnesses embedded deep in my psyche.
And so I joke with you in your paneled office
and plan my next trip to the Isle of Capri.
Suggesting that perhaps we could suture my frayed vessels
with fine laughter instead of silk.
rather than accept your bleak prognosis of my possible pending demise.

I wonder,
as a practiced surgeon ready to wield a scalpel,
what first you saw, as you dispassionately peered at the map of my world.
And if I let you open me from neck to navel,
would you actually be able to save me?

What would you interpret of the trauma within?
Would you shake your head with knitted brow
and concentrate like a master mechanic,
tinkering under the hood of a favorite roadster?

I can almost see you
kneading my soft purplish heart.
Accurately noting,
each crack, healed
each fissure, closed
each time, failed
that I allowed her to be broken
or failed to perform preventive maintenance.

And if I let you probe deeper,
examining my psyche (to save a soul),
Would you thoughtfully untangle the wire;
remove the staples and blue;
of my sincere yet botched attempts
to mend and gird

And would you knowingly understand
that I had done the best I could,

under the circumstances?

Just so that I could slip and fall and love

Again,

and again
and once more,
just this once more, again.

Maybe you could make me famous.
"patient, female," the subject of an important medical treatise:
having understood the mechanism of why the brain shuts off conveniently
when the body needs to find its own solace
or why what faculty and reason one seems to possess
conveniently escapes
like butterflies distracted to a flower garden
each time I stared into the eyes of love.

If you do, I will send you long letters of thanks
and smile when you are published in the Annals.

So trustingly I let you trace this line,
thoughtful fingers tenderly remembering
the paths of your own injuries,
And as your tears splash among my bowels
I am not surprised that you let the bloody scalpel clang to the floor.

Knowing, as you examine me,
knowing, as you try to save me..
knowing, like the good doctor Luke
that a physician must first heal himself.