http://stephenlin.bandcamp.com/track/spoken-word
A good rhyme is like a stranger who spends half a night staring at you from across the room, and when they do say “Hi”, they’re looking straight into your eyes at the broken biography written there in pieces of how other people read you. I want to talk about dying with this person, who knows enough to skim the pages and not give a damn about the lines or the words, who knows that what makes something come to life is the life that you bring to it. And like any good rhyme, like anything worth it, it’s ephemeral. The words continue, the night is nothing but the cooling, blackened memory of the day, and the serendipity of a comfortable conversation with a stranger is a faint echo of the time we will lose to each other.
A good metaphor is like an acid trip. Yes, I know that’s a simile, but this is about verisimilitude, and the way life fractures like fractals, and how the dancing lights behind closed eyes are just reflections of themselves. I’ve stared long and hard, imagining atoms secure in their dense center, surrounded and defined by dancing chaos like ourselves. Post-psychedelics, everything is a metaphor for everything else. You can tell what kind of a man I am by every little god damn thing I do, just as you can tell what kind of a world this is by who we are. The revelation of a connection is as shocking as finding God, drifting through space. An idea is the most persistent thing in an ephemeral world, and metaphor is a means of keeping the feeling of home with us wherever we go, even if it’s so far that the memories of where we began are no longer visible. The metaphor carries us to the joy of discovery, and reassures us that there is always something familiar and recognizable, even when we are completely lost. This is life seeking itself, expressing itself through itself, holding itself, and carrying on until it finds something willing to take it.
Good rhythm. Good rhythm’s not circadian and it’s not circular. I see too many people awake at both 4:20s in a day, to assume that this symmetry, this structure, this regularity is anything but awful. Any natural rhythm is arrhythmic, entropic eventually. The days are always getting longer, the nights stay long after the morning, and yet the inconsistency of my heartbeat never longs to be given a foot or a meter. Rhythm is, like so many other good things, a lie to ourselves, a line to follow in the paralyzingly, terrifyingly vast world opening to us. It’s a primal pill to be taken for the anxiety of freedom, and it’s a shelter from the potential we have in ourselves for blessed chaos. It’s a way to stay safe in the unanswered call of a forced routine, a ringing regularity on and on and on and on. But a good rhythm is a choice to say fuck the metronome, fuck the ticks, and fuck the patronizing talks, fuck anyone who shows you a fucking clock and says time is running out, and you better stop wasting it. A good rhythm is following the hollow sound of your heart to wherever it goes, taking those steps off beat, waiting in silence just too long, talking too god damn much, and still knowing when to let it end.
A good rhyme is like a stranger who spends half a night staring at you from across the room, and when they do say “Hi”, they’re looking straight into your eyes at the broken biography written there in pieces of how other people read you. I want to talk about dying with this person, who knows enough to skim the pages and not give a damn about the lines or the words, who knows that what makes something come to life is the life that you bring to it. And like any good rhyme, like anything worth it, it’s ephemeral. The words continue, the night is nothing but the cooling, blackened memory of the day, and the serendipity of a comfortable conversation with a stranger is a faint echo of the time we will lose to each other.
A good metaphor is like an acid trip. Yes, I know that’s a simile, but this is about verisimilitude, and the way life fractures like fractals, and how the dancing lights behind closed eyes are just reflections of themselves. I’ve stared long and hard, imagining atoms secure in their dense center, surrounded and defined by dancing chaos like ourselves. Post-psychedelics, everything is a metaphor for everything else. You can tell what kind of a man I am by every little god damn thing I do, just as you can tell what kind of a world this is by who we are. The revelation of a connection is as shocking as finding God, drifting through space. An idea is the most persistent thing in an ephemeral world, and metaphor is a means of keeping the feeling of home with us wherever we go, even if it’s so far that the memories of where we began are no longer visible. The metaphor carries us to the joy of discovery, and reassures us that there is always something familiar and recognizable, even when we are completely lost. This is life seeking itself, expressing itself through itself, holding itself, and carrying on until it finds something willing to take it.
Good rhythm. Good rhythm’s not circadian and it’s not circular. I see too many people awake at both 4:20s in a day, to assume that this symmetry, this structure, this regularity is anything but awful. Any natural rhythm is arrhythmic, entropic eventually. The days are always getting longer, the nights stay long after the morning, and yet the inconsistency of my heartbeat never longs to be given a foot or a meter. Rhythm is, like so many other good things, a lie to ourselves, a line to follow in the paralyzingly, terrifyingly vast world opening to us. It’s a primal pill to be taken for the anxiety of freedom, and it’s a shelter from the potential we have in ourselves for blessed chaos. It’s a way to stay safe in the unanswered call of a forced routine, a ringing regularity on and on and on and on. But a good rhythm is a choice to say fuck the metronome, fuck the ticks, and fuck the patronizing talks, fuck anyone who shows you a fucking clock and says time is running out, and you better stop wasting it. A good rhythm is following the hollow sound of your heart to wherever it goes, taking those steps off beat, waiting in silence just too long, talking too god damn much, and still knowing when to let it end.
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