Golden light beams down from above…
A feeling of comfort floods the air…
Brown leaves tumble and are carried by the gentle breeze…
Change is everywhere…
The ground is wet, making it slippery under foot…
Things look the same – but, as with every new day,
differences surround and reveal themselves to me…
It is a magical time of the year…
New stories are being written,
as Old tales are being retold…
The cycle of nature continues
and now it is the season of Autumn’s turn
to fall upon everyone like a flurry of red leaves…
This season of transition will herald the arrival
of one of our world’s greatest natural wonders…
This season will be when all the instruments
and when all the notes and the chords will be played
by the ever-present players of nature’s orchestra,
whose music will crescendo higher and higher
until the last leaves have danced and fallen
in time with the golden season’s symphony
until it’s last breath.
music
My Poem “Rhapsody”
The voices of everybody over-lap…
one minute the music is jazz,
the next the beautiful melody of a piano…
the echoes of a chorus of sounds
are carried through the air
like the waves of an ocean…
there are moments of time that run slow
and there are those that race past
and then are gone again in a flash…
there is a dance of people,
of language, of emotions,
of noise, of stillness, of silence…
the beats of a heart,
the thoughts of a mind,
the air and the ambiance
that flows gently like a stream
can gradually become a waterfall –
the place, the people, the music,
the moment that is filled
with an infinite number of instants
that make them who and what they are
is what is at the heart
and what is the true essence
of what poetry, to me, is all about…
the best poetry comes from the heart of a poet
who feels a moment of time and an experience
so deeply and so profoundly
that it can only be expressed as a rhapsody.
My Poem “The Piano”
Even now I can still hear
the beautiful melody
of that piano concerto play…
An unknown melody
that instantly made me smile,
daydream, and feel
at my ease in every way…
Something amazing,
like the gift of an angel,
that filled my mind,
my heart, my soul…
A feeling of contentment
that made me imagine
as if I were below
a dark sky filled with stars
and standing upon the soft sand
of a beach, hand-in-hand
with the one I love…
I was truly touched by the music
that I heard, the music that I felt…
The music that I can still hear…
The beautiful solo performance
by a single piano player…
It’s meaning to me
is far beyond what I know…
I don’t know who the player is
and I don’t know what the name
of the piece is –
but I do know how I feel
every time I hear
the music of the piano.
My Poem “Sax in the city”
Hearing the sound of a saxophone
being played on Cherry Street
today was unexpected…
hearing somebody play a piece of music,
or sing a song, for the love of playing
and being heard by others is truly inspiring…
every performer I have ever heard performing
has been to me like watching
a magician perform some trick of magic…
when you hear a particular song
at the right time
you can’t stop yourself from smiling,
crying, or feeling something
that makes your daydreams echo freely…
music that touches my soul always stays with me –
just as the song that I heard this morning still is…
I am so grateful for the gift of music,
and I am so thankful to the talented musician
that I heard this morning on Cherry Street
playing his sax in the city.
(The saxophone player was playing “Take Five” by Dave Brubeck)
My Poem ‘Cornucopia’
Different voices appeal to different people…
different values can be found
within the heart of members of the same family…
different songs and different styles of music
strike different tones depending on
who is listening to them…
different minds and different lives
contain different thoughts, feelings,
and drives, that need the right elixir
to elicit a reaction to break the shell
of their outside facade to set them free.
We are all different – nobody is a robot…
we are all looking for what makes sense –
but sometimes life is a melting-pot
from which we have to put the time
and the effort into molding the molten-soup
that we find into exactly what we want.
Humanity is a choir
of many different accents,
that at times sing harmoniously
as-one with the same message…
our entire planet and every form of life
is an opera with an infinite number
of parts and characters…
some people can be kind,
some people can be savage –
and yet everyone is a vital instrument
in life’s interstellar-orchestra,
even though some people may not think
that what they say actually matters.
I have always championed diversity,
differences, and variety…
I have always thought that it was both
healthy and necessary to make-believe,
to find something that you love doing,
and to never feel too self-conscious
about doing what makes you happy…
some people listen to music,
some people make music,
some people express their gifts
through art that can be easily shared –
me, I write poetry…
but one thing is for sure:
everybody is meant to be different,
and the world is meant to be
a diverse cornucopia.
My Poem ‘My Jam’
From All Hail The Silence, to BT…
from The 1975, to David Bowie…
from Savage Garden, to Johnny Cash…
from Ed Sheeran, to Set It Off…
from John Lennon, to Walk The Moon…
from Young Guns, to Muse…
from CHVRCHES, to Christian Burns…
from Bruce Springsteen, to Green Day…
from Lady Antebellum, to James Bay…
from Carrie Underwood, to a-ha…
from Armin van Buuren, to Bruno Mars…
from Bon Jovi, to Bryan Adams…
from Coldplay, to Michael Jackson…
from Tears For Fears, to Sixpence None the Richer…
from Daft Punk, to New Order…
from Prince, to Deadmau5…
from Tracy Chapman, to Crowded House…
and many many more –
that is but a selection of the artists
and the bands who make music
and who have created songs
that I adore and I listen to over and over.
Music is a great source of inspiration for a writer,
and the music and the songs that inspire me the most
are those with a message to them that touches my heart
and sets off a chain-reaction
and a rejuvenation of spirit within me like no other –
from Electronic Dance Music, to Rock…
from Classical, to Pop…
from fast, to slow…
from a ballad, to something wholly-instrumental –
I find great peace and beauty,
I find great love and serenity,
in hearing the voice and the music
of the heart of an artist, or artists,
that bridges the gap from my ears, to my mind…
from my imagination, to my soul.
My love for all types of music
stems from when I was a boy –
even as a child, I knew there was something special
to what I heard all-around me,
which others might just have
thought was background noise…
my heart has a rhythm to it
and it creates its own music with every beat –
and even now, when I hear a great song
that I haven’t heard before,
it doesn’t take me long
before my heart skips-a-beat
and I am tapping away with my fingers
and moving in-time, to the music I hear,
with every movement of my feet…
when I hear my favourite songs,
I secretly have this insatiable urge
to “bust-a-move” and dance –
there is a deep-seated reason
why music means so much to me,
there is a truth to why
I could never live without music
that stares right back at me every day
in the mirror of my mind…
whenever I listen to my playlist on my iPod,
I always get millions of sparks of inspiration,
and for a long-time after I finish listening
to my favourite songs I still hear
the echoes of the music
that make up “My Jam”.
My Poem ‘Radio’
Sometimes, some days,
I feel like a radio…
sometimes, some days,
inspiration is ready and waiting
for me to wake up –
even first thing in the morning
when I look out my bedroom window
and I see the light of the sun…
sometimes, some days, it takes me a minute
to receive and to re-tune to the right frequency –
to the universal station of inspiration
that I always listen to…
sometimes, some days, I need to download
an update to my internal, poetic,
biological operating-system,
and think in a way that I have never thought before,
and seek-out a higher-power with a question
of something that I do not yet know.
Sometimes I need to be in the right place…
sometimes I need to be in the right mood…
sometimes I need to be thinking the right thoughts,
or seeing the right face…
sometimes, to get the best and the strongest
inspiration-signal, I need to focus…
I need to close my eyes…
I need to go within myself
and touch the source of my soul…
I need to let my daydreams free
and use my gifts to turn them into words…
sometimes, when I am writing,
it is like I am solving a mystery
by following and piecing-together
a string of clues.
I write, and I express myself, noticeably differently
depending on the time of the year, the time of the day,
and the time that I spend somewhere…
sometimes what I write, and where it comes from,
is just as much of a surprise to me
as it is to those who read what I write –
sometimes I can honestly say
where a piece of inspiration comes from,
and sometimes I just don’t know…
the art of writing is first learning how to listen –
and, to me, music is a vital source of inspiration
that is beyond-compare…
sometimes, before you can give,
you first need to receive –
and sometimes the best way to do that
is to do what I do,
and to think like a radio.
My Poem ‘Echoes’
When I turn the other way,
I hear the sound of echoes
that are following me;
when I open up my heart,
I breath in and I breath out
the essence of divine poetry;
when I look to the sky above,
I hear the song of stars
that are hidden from view;
when I touch the Earth below,
I feel the rhythm of life
that feeds the trees
and makes the flowers bloom.
When I close my eyes at night,
I go to a place that calls to me;
when I reach beyond my grasp,
I touch the face of infinite beauty;
when I see the light of day,
I feel the gift of god within;
when I walk through the rain,
I feel the drops of purity upon my skin;
when I fly above the clouds,
I see the playground where the angels dwell;
when I dream of heaven’s gates,
I wonder if I will be welcomed one day
within open-arms or by the sound of a bell.
When I wake up every day,
I know that I am here
for a reason that I do not yet know;
when I see the lightning in the sky,
when I feel the static in the air,
when I hear the sound of thunder,
I reach up my hands
to catch the bolts of electricity,
and I live every moment after
addicted to the echoes.
My Poem ‘Background Artist’
I am in the foreground of every landscape…
I am in the background of every picture…
I am in the orchestra that plays
the music of the spheres throughout interstellar-space…
I am interwoven into the language of the universe –
and yet too few ever see me…
not everyone knows how to look me in the eye…
not everyone can read the true meaning of my poetry…
no one knows what I have seen,
where I have been,
and what I have done already in my life.
There is only so much you can say with words…
there is only so many colours of a palette to paint with…
there is only so many moments in this world…
there is only so much you can give –
unless you know what to say and how to say it,
and you are in one of the places in the world
where language becomes as transformative as magic…
timing is everything – however,
if you know what, where, and how to say,
see, hear, and feel everything,
then you can realize anything into being.
A thing’s most defining feature lies just out of sight…
life’s most hidden mysteries
are only a blink away from being seen…
the content of a person’s heart and their soul
echoes around them and casts a shadow behind them
when they are standing in front of a bright light…
a dream can be a reality, just as reality can be a dream.
Doors rarely open for long…
opportunities sometimes only knock once…
bursts of inspiration can be so short…
time does not wait for us to catch up to it…
the world turns without pause –
but if we can find a place of peace and belonging
wherever we are, then we can never be lost…
there is something to be found, even in an empty room…
if we just learn to hold on to hope
and use what power and energy is has
then things have a way of jumping out at us,
like a baby deer running through a forest…
what you see is just one dimension of the whole…
just behind who and what you see,
I am standing there, looking, smiling,
imagining, writing, inspiring from afar…
I am constantly seen, and then missed –
but I am always where I am supposed to be,
doing what I was born to do:
an optimistic, poetic, omnipresent,
background artist.
My Poem ’50 year-old Revolver’
I’m sitting here in my kitchen,
at the kitchen table,
with The Beatles’ “Revolver”
playing on my record-player
and a Smith&Wesson
lying next to my still cold bottle of beer…
the house is quiet…
I am sitting almost in complete darkness,
but for the light of the fluorescent-light above my head…
I am thinking about my life –
what happened to screw-up my world so bad…
I am planning by the end of the night
to end it all – and by that I mean
I plan to be dead…
I just can’t take the pain of the heart-break any longer –
I don’t have any-more fight left in me…
this isn’t the first night that I have sat like this
in the dark with a gun in front of me,
but tonight I know is the night
when the stetson of death
that I have been trying on now for a while just feels right.
I am a washed-cowboy…
I am a man planning to ride off
into the sunset and never come back…
I have seen sights and I have been through a lot
since I was a boy –
living without a daddy since I was five,
dropping our of school, making a living
doing what other people wanted me to do,
drinking myself under more tables than I can remember
in bars in each-and-every-one of the fifty states,
surviving a heart-attack…
loving, hurting, pretty-much earning a living
doing things that even I can’t find the words
capable of describing what has slowly but surely
earned me a one-way ticket to hell…
if my life has been a dream this entire time
it has been a nightmare from beginning to end…
my fate was already signed, sealed,
and delivered a long time ago –
there was never any question of how,
just the ultimate question of when?
I always loved The Beatles,
and I have done since I saw them
on Ed Sullivan in ’65 –
I used to wake up every morning for a year
with the words to “Good Day Sunshine”
echoing in my ears…
any-time that I was feeling low,
I would recite the lyrics to “Eleanor Rigby” in my head
and instantly I would smile and feel more alive…
I haven’t listened to a vinyl-copy
of a Beatles record since 1985 –
but over the years I have heard and listened
to The Beatles’ music wherever,
and in whichever town I came to rest,
and every time I did I would throwback
a glass of J.D. and relive the brief happy times
that I remember from my life.
Death is like the Taxman
that you spend your entire life
trying to hide and run from;
I have been seeing the signs leading me
to where I now sit all my life –
Here, There, and Everywhere –
and when the moment of me sitting here
with my Pa’s Revolver that he left for me,
and The Beatles album that I remember the most of all
playing and it’s songs echoing all around me,
now feels like the moment when I am
going to do no more For No One else but me –
and I Want To Tell You that at this moment
I know that nothing and no one
this time is going to stop me.
And then, I wake up…
And as I lift up my head,
and as I open my eyes again,
I look out my window and I see the sun rise…
and I feel a hand upon my shoulder,
and I hear a voice telling me that
Tomorrow Never Knows who any of us will be,
but God did not ever do anything for no reason
and that if I just hold on a little longer
I would one day be saved and find true peace.
I had always been a believer –
I even remember sitting across a table
and sharing a beer with the Devil-himself
in Vegas in September of 2001…
I have seen and I have heard people pray for their lives –
but God never once spoke to me directly:
but maybe he is now?
I have spent my entire life
running the roads and seeing every wonder
of color to be found in the United States of America –
but it wasn’t until the moment when I was woken up
and saved by the light that greeted me this morning,
after the life that I had been living ended,
and I decided to take my life into my own hands
and walk away from all that I had ever known –
leaving behind what I knew
had been holding me back like an anchor:
my old house, my record-player, my life,
and my daddy’s fully-loaded
50 year-old revolver.
Mark The Poet 