To Ride my Songs is to Know my Heart
(Alan’s essay for the enclosure in the CD “Ride my Heart”)
Everyone knows that a true lover can never turn back. Why should s/he want to? There is nothing more entrancing than cliff-jumping destiny (for the fearless outrider) as the precursor to heart-thumping ecstasy (if one uses a hang glider). So when a voice [ironically] says to you (as you hurtle towards your love) “Turn back if you can!”, you’ll smile softly to yourself — armed with the knowledge of blood, fire and tears — and, following the sign marked “This way to True Romance”, you will stride purposefully over that cliff regretting nothing. Speaking of “cliffs”, please answer me one question: Have you ever seen a stone which cries? Yes, you have, whether you know it or not. Are you seriously going to tell me that you’ve never felt the desperate petrifaction of dereliction? You cannot get blood out of a stone but you can get tears (how they foam!), if you know which games to play — which words to say (for example, “your song has touched my heart and melted my iceolation”). Words… They can be spun like dew-soaked gossamer in the sunlight of dawn. Spin doctors are not just a twentieth century invention. The inventors of history (benignly called “historians”) are the greatest spin doctors of all time. Those working on behalf of Henry Tudor (aka King Henry VII of England) posthumously depicted their great foe, King Richard III of York, as a hunchback (a falsehood propagated by William Shakespeare in his play, Richard the Third) in order to make him seem to have been ‘cursed by God’. By royal edict, all portraits of him had a hunch superimposed on them by some grovelling artists of the day in order to endorse this “truth”. Amazing what a little colour will do for a reverse makeover (quaintly known in legal circles as “defamation of character”). Colour-killers. That’s what they are. Of course, everything can have a colour; even the frown on my face when I see those killers at work. Winter, on the other hand, is distinctly monochrome. That is, until Springtime’s deft palette superimposes its golden rhyme on Winter’s witchy wasteland. The flowers, the leaves, the plants and the trees — the sun, the rain, the birds and the bees. How do they know that their time has come? The answer lies deep in the mystery! Is a secret the same as a mystery? Kindof. But not when it is both crazy and sweet. There is nothing mysterious about such a secret as that. It is mellifluously brushed under the carpet of love; but the beauty of mystery will never grow there. It is a love which grows in darkness a thousandfold. It is a love which poses as friendship but must never be told. It is an apart kind of love which can only be found in mysteryless gold. Now imagine a box hammered out of that precious metal. Then see it in your heart. It is there in each one of us, secreting its contents with a dribble or a flood (or none at all) — the choice is yours (or maybe not so “yours” if, some moons ago, you suffered a fall). If we all choose the flood then the world could be healed. But some things never heal. Sparks burn and leave their mark; but don’t see it all as negative. Scars are the teachers (in matters of love) from whom all can be learned. There is much to be gleaned (if patient you’ll be) when you get your hands burned. You’ll learn to keep away from brittle game-players who know nothing of the ways of the deep blue sea. They think that all such swimming is pornography. They think that drowning is the place to be. No hand comes for them from depths of darkness down. They will never hear the siren-song dissolving dreams of states long gone — the muted incandescent cry of ecstasy. To give themselves to such a love would mean a sea-change. Sea the change. See the change. Someone once said “Be the change!” But when I heard that respectable pop song of passive ‘protest’, “Waiting on the World to Change”, the words on my heart were: “No way. We’ll be waiting forever. It’s up to us to be the change”, then perchance some 0y (naughty) things around us may change. The big reason why so little changes is because we don’t dare to raise a finger like we know we should. Making songs and things which b u r n. Going beyond passivity’s the last frontier. 6 words. Big challenge. And 6 is a human number which — times ten — is ten short of three score and ten (looking back, I gasp): the allotted lifespan. So they say.
if I may
be so bold
as to say
(words of gold)
Age is a feather bed
on which no one has time to lie
and by the time you’re due to die
it’s far too late to apply
all the hands-on
fingers-burned
things-learned
knowledge you’ve acquired
Love is all that counts if you can make it (take it [but never fake it]). Falling into pieces down the hole you find below. Fragmented splinters of passion with their particles all aglow. That worn-down old road without which we can never flow. Bottom lines: You’re taking a journey on my innermost thoughts and feelings. You’re riding my songs; therefore you’re riding my heart. Please tread carefully. These are the milestones and markers of this minstrel’s changes and journeyings. If you can empathise, then I will not be alone. I will come to you in your dreams on a carpet weaved from words with seams from music made and we will meet on some dusty fertile hillside beyond the furthest tree before the snow starts. Will you be there?
© 2010 Alan Morrison
The Naked Troubadour 