Here's a cover my friend Clint and I did of AA Bondy's "Mightiest of Guns." He laid down the guitar at the beginning as well as the main vocal. Whispering, steel string, harmonies, and other weird crap was produced/arranged/mastered by yours truly. Started yesterday, finished a few minutes ago.

Click ----> Mightiest of Guns

I stood on top of a scene. From the staccato report of clinking glasses, the stool's weary creak, the tiresome whir of overhead fans, a melody emerged bearing more meaning, more importance than the vacuous symbols issued from its players. A composer before noise, an artist before lines, a god-man before death, I claimed meaning where there once was none, and there was meaning irregardless. I stood before and held the present, then slipped, and I was, again, a noise among many.

What an odd place a comparative few find. When, from the tireless chattering about us, a sea of seeming imperatives (why?), we, suddenly, find ourselves standing on a strip of land where the sea, for a moment, has held its breath and receded. We face, quietly, the scene about us. The automated parts, the floating cogs that make up a consuming listlessness, we face it; we have seen what is, and it is not as it should be, and we cannot, in good conscience (or in any capacity at all, at this point), return to what was and live as if it were standard and acceptable fare, as if we'd never seen what the banal cacophony hides beneath its frothing tips. The tide recedes for few; where the world is glimpsed and the things in it are forgotten, and what lies before is being affording itself.

Anxiously, constantly, ashing your cigarette; embers, then fragile soot of quickly spent memory. Dwell on a wet ash tray. Dwell on that thing from earlier today. Dwellings of the un-dealt-with: the ancient oak bar, the coarse jokes, the deafening laughter; home away from a home that we refuse to make. At the end of it is an aching question, best avoided, and let to linger till our next visit.

Ah, what was that? A piece, a fragment, where the wind blew just right, just now, and the way the light is playing on that willow's branches, the way it dances, and through my eyes and throat and lungs it pools, just for a moment. And this brief tick (tock) is felt, an object, where all the things that are right now, the things that grip at the fabric of this second, flow through its prism and separate and throw scenes (their smells, feelings), long forgotten, onto the canyon wall, over the vast divide that keeps sweet memory blurred. Look! The way this autumn air crisps, there I am when I was young, when my father was strong and took me on walks through New England's ancient maple and ash. The light, it flits and beckons, and that is my first love, when I was afraid of the thing. And the blue sky, its soft wind, I am small and cradled in the sleeping lap of my mother. It leaves me, and I'm left short of breath, working quickly to dig a wider moat.

There are straps that snake around our curves and constrict. Well worn things, flaking and ancient, but no less capable. Easily loosed, should we so choose, the sinewy thing no longer distinguishable from our limp frames. Once, a chance was seized before it passed, and it was as it should when one grasps such a thing. Once, I saw tree that had swallowed the balustrade about it, but it's us, now, who've been hedged in by the palisade that commands, "only this, and nothing more, nothing more." How feeble does one grow, useless limbs despoiled even of its muscle's memory. Hope, dream, and other such mighty trope, once vital and now vestigial, even they've forgotten their legs. Could it be that but one heave of the chest, one deep breath, would be enough to slip the weight of this restraint? But it is more common, and much simpler, to pinch one's bated breath.

Sylvia Plath saw a fig tree stretched out in front and above her, laden with fruit, her possible lives, her choices to make. It's an interesting thing, really, and if it were so simple! Each fig was this, or that; really, though, each fig, each choice, would bear another thousand, thousand trees. Choices to make, yes, and innumerable, but also innumerable the choices to never possibly be made; the choice in not choosing one thing in choosing another. She wrote of how the figs withered when she, faced with an untold harvest of ripe 'to be', could not pick but one, her arms laden with possibility, and all she could do was watch. We are placed in a world of possibility, endless, and possibility wanting nothing but to be grasped. Where Plath grasps authenticity, perhaps, is that she was able to comprehend the tree in the first place, to watch the fruit wither. An inauthentic life floats imbued with life, though quite lifelessly, and without seeing. Should you see a tree burdened with possibility, take, if you wish. Should you not take, then you did not take, and took something else in not taking, but you chose to do so.

Then again, this could all just be very, very wrong.

A fleeing dream on the vestiges of sleep will infect and compose an entire day. The odd tints and angles, mismatched persons and actions, these things may color our gaze and break old trains of thought. And now this is connected to that, sometimes for the day, and sometimes never the same. Once fallow thought is now rich and green, and another, weighty and always pregnant with meaning, concedes its loving breath and lies still.

And who is it that wields this strange power? And why? Is it that sleep provides a secure venue for the secret, subdued things skittering (or sleeping) about during waking hours? How do they move on their own? When they are brought to light, during the day (should one be so brave), how is it that they cannot be expelled (that is, should one desire their expulsion)?