useless art

I pull on the notes with little grace, the sounds stumbling through the wood like lost marionettes trudging across wet cement. Plink. Plonk. Thonnnnng. A tired phone ringing beneath a thick raincoat. Thin ice breaking under the heel of worn-down sneakers. Change falling on wet, bent cardboard.

Fingers know the pattern, to a point – well enough to push down, slide across, intimate a reason to these motions. But it’s more like fucking than love – two strangers under the spell of fiction, fumbling around in the dark, kissing beer bottles and breaking beds with insistent axes. My hands don’t know how to write down a phone number or cradle a dozen roses or even pull out a chair. They’re just two balls of meat flexible enough to work the zipper and the knob.

Trying to play “Blackbird” . I’m always trying to play “Blackbird”. I keep trying, but I get in my own way. Broken wings can never fly. It sounds like I’m the one killing the damn bird. I don’t carry a gun. I respect living things. But I drive a big Cadillac with no power steering down an unlit one-lane road and the dim bird can’t recognize that the wink of my headlights isn’t an invitation.

Trying all sorts of songs. I try my own songs – not true songs, not organized units of melody and harmony, but treatises on the will of a stubborn bastard too proud to show proper respect to the muses. They turn to mulch, pull apart like dirty strips of tape, return to random noise. I’m a fool learning to read by hitting my head on The Bible. Thou Shalt Learn. Thou Shalt Learn. Thou Shalt Learn.

And yet, for those times I’m alone in my room, cradling the guitar in the crook of my legs, and I hit that one note, that one moment filling the darkness with light so blinding my eyes are forced to stay open, and my hands move of their own volition, and more notes emerge, and suddenly it makes perfect sense. Even when I’m at a loss to understand, it makes perfect sense.

So I answer the phone, and I step carefully across the frozen road, and I pick up the pennies, and I continue to plink and plunk and thonnnng, and each callus grows strong, and my hands slowly begin to realize what it means to love. And, Lo, There Was Light.