Tag: teddy bears

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Charleston, West Virginia Music & Songs On My Own Plants and the Emerald Kingdom

The Bear

Hi…. You know I am realizing one of my huge problems in life is being too hyper and impatient. I can’t bear taking more than 5 minutes to record a song & during that time I also managed to destroy a frying pan I really loved by setting it on fire, losing one bowl of macaroni and cheese by dropping it on the floor, one box of straws by dropping it on floor and breaking my headphones all because I couldn’t resist trying to eat dinner and record at the same time. And I melted a grill lighter on a lit stovetop.

The world was cold there was no easy place.
The world was flat nowhere to hide.
The winds would blow in a disorienting way,
Then they’d grow still from time to time.

The people run to you with smiles upon their faces
Then they twirl and disappear into a hat.
You were supposed to know which words were true
And which ones you should not believe but how could you know that?

The grass was green a checkerboard that never ended.
The men were tall and thin like stilts.
They danced so fancy with their bodies twirled and bended
Then they’d tip their hat and like a leaf they’d wilt.

They left green hearts upon the grass where you could see them
But it wasn’t clear what any of them meant.
Reach down to touch one and it disappears beneath your hand
But maybe that was never their intent.

The sun would rise while you were still asleep
To fill the air with yellow clowns.
Their yellow faces through your sleepy eyes looked queer
And so you’d close your eyes and lie back on the ground.

You’d wait til noon when you could see the men come running
On their skinny legs beneath the happy sun.
Maybe I’ll watch them dance and clap for them for one more day
A seal inside their yellow tent of fun.

But when the night came there was no relief.
It poured down like a jet black wave.
You shook with cold and an emotion much like grief
As though your feelings made a difference to a bear inside his cave.

The stars were shining but too far away to hear you
And the greatest bear was nowhere to be found.
You tried to think there must be something that you missed
But all your thoughts would squirt then dribble to the ground.

So close your eyes and let the memories come back
To spread like ink upon a page.
It could be that life is just a dream that we can’t understand
And you must lie unmoving while the stars dance in their cage.

The BearDownload

Her fur reminds me of a warm safe place where as a child I’d hide.



Categories
Charleston, West Virginia Music & Songs Plants and the Emerald Kingdom Uncategorized Videos

Ferris Wheel (video)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3ZTHLzpYCw

Definitely, I would say this is the song that describes me most, except that I have never thought of myself as green, except for maybe one short year, when I was trying to get in touch with the spirit of music, and I figured it was somewhere in between the colors blue & green, so I gave away all my pink & white things to trade them in for blue & green ones.

I even wore a stretchy blue teddy bear sweater on my head as a hat. I was very poor and it was on clearance for $1, so I just hoped no would would notice the little sleeves. I also tried to eat as much black licorice as possible & scent everything with anise & fennel, which seemed to me (along with lilac) to be the most musical scents, due to their twisted nature.

Music is a twisty sort of thing that connects what is real to what isn’t. Like an affirmation in reverse, music is a channel through which bad things can exit reality. You should never sing about anything good, because you might spin it out of existence.

Music expands our reality in a horizontal direction. It can’t connect us to upper or lower realms, but rather opens the door to realities that are parallel to our own. I think of these as the etheric worlds- where beings similar to the ones in storybooks live. Beings who are eternal, amoral and tied in to the same physical reality as us. Especially those semi-transparent humanoid beings who are around 4 feet high.

But none of this relates to this song, which was written more recently and not during that blue & green time. It was a song I heard while sleeping, which turned out to be the time of a lunar eclipse, which makes sense, given its silvery feeling. I don’t think of the moon as being only silver though, but also green since it turns everything into goo, just like the primordial green ooze that the world came out of.

Sometimes I feel like I am drowning in primordial ooze and struggling to come up for a breath of crisp air.

*

The moon a crescent in the sky
The world a carpet down below
He came to place me on the ferris wheel
His face a shadow in the show.

Green. Green.

Pull back the curtain and you’ll find
An empty room that know one knows
Shake your head and climb the ferris wheel
This is the world that you will come to know.

Green. Green.

I thought the flowers they would one day, one day
I thought the leaves and trees would one day call me home.

You take my hand just like a leaf
You show my foot just where to go
You help me climb upon the ferris wheel
You point down at the world below.

Green. Green.

Mostly, I think it is a really bad idea to include photographs of husbands. Not to mention that James values his invisibility. And yet… for the sake of context, I feel he needs to make a yearly appearance. After all, most of my adult years my identity has been that of a wife (to him + a previous husband) & not so much an individual.

But of course, I am trying to defy nature by changing that which is just one reason why including any photographs of James is a bad idea.

Categories
Nashville Red, Soldiers, & Fire Sky Blue, Ether, Flags, and Fairies Uncategorized

Made Love to My Father

 

I made love to my father and now I must pay... The True Story of a Confederate Soldier by Julien AkleiWell, it looks like this is my final song! I have finally recorded and posted all the songs I have written so far. Phew. Now I am free to move on to something new… maybe I will grow my fingernails out into out long, golden talons studded with rhinestones and tiny teddy bears. Ah, that sounds like paradise!

I think this is a decent song for my grand finale, because… well, I remember when I wrote it, the sky was so so blue and the song unfolded page by page in my mind like a storybook, filling me with a sense of eternity. Which is to say, I have positive associations with it.

Also, this song captures a world I frequently try to capture in my songs– a place I call “Checkerboard World.” Checkerboard World is more or less the same as this world, except that everything seems slightly more luminous, more crisp and defined. Plus there is a giant checkerboard that covers the earth and one in the sky as well. The checkered squares in the grass are large- maybe 10 feet wide on average- but in the sky they are even larger, maybe up to a mile wide! But the size of the checkerboard grid varies from place to place, sometimes expanding, sometimes condensing. It all depends on how much space the space contains.

But don’t confuse Checkerboard World with heaven. This is not the land of golden angels. There are still thugs in their dark alleys and scoops of chocolate ice cream that topple onto new white shirts. But there may be something about the clarity and spaciousness of the place that makes it easier for people to recover completely from the bad things that do happen. And in Checkerboard World there is no time, meaning there is plenty of opportunity to sit and cry for as long as you need to. Well, technically time does exists, but only as a way of subdividing eternity, which stretches out around people in all directions (like a checkerboard). Even death is nothing but an opportunity to evaporate up to the giant checkerboard in the sky so you can pour down again like rain.

Download MP3: Made Love to My Father