This is a silly piece I composed in MuseScore recently. To my great annoyance, WordPress forbids uploads of the .mscz
file type, but if you’re keen to tinker, I’ve uploaded it to Proton Drive.
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This is probably the oldest recording I have that I actually like. I used a cheap guitar, a cheap amp, a cheap laptop, and a cheap cable, because that’s what I had in college. Much of my archives are in need of re-recording, but the slightly low-fidelity fuzz to this whole track suits the piece, rather than being a detriment.
I’ll have a good opportunity to record soon, and I have several candidate songs ready.
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A short acoustic guitar piece made of a few stray ideas, finally given a home in A Fine Wine, a short Three Houses fan fiction by ReynelUvirith.
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There’s a wisp of hair, and a scent,
dangling, lingering in the stale hallway—
strands me in a mental prison,
and the inmates are bellowing thoughtcrime aloud,
and I stay quiet, reaching for spirits,
trying not to scare the ghosts away.
Ahead is the dream, streaming with coattails
and kicked-up dust from the lost highway,
ahead is the spirit, the ideal, the goal,
and I’ve firewalled the throttle where all the other dreamers
flipped on their turn signals and, out of thirst,
turned off at the exit five miles back.There’s a cloud of paper scraps,
billowing, hurtling lazily toward me,
gliding over the windshield on a cushion of air.
One sticks to the glass and boldly declares:
…no, it’s only the litter of a forgotten errand.
The wipers squeak it away,
and all the while I’m rattling my own metal cage
with an empty tin cup, begging for money or spirits,
begging for water or for release. Miles away
I’m cruising, gunning, chasing a ghost, thirsting for ethanol.
I cracked open a can of dawn, threw the daylight down my throat,
tossed the can aside and let the wind of the desert road swallow it.There’s a rusted-out husk of an old Chevy,
beat to death and abandoned by the wayside,
abandoned by a dreamer too thirsty to carry on.
The holes in its body, bored by gritty winds and scavengers,
are windows to a steel skeleton,
relieved of its spirit by a gash in the grille,
gaping open and disfigured like a broken jaw—
I keep my foot on the gas.There’s a guard coming into the hallway,
skulking with the sunken eyes and implacable grumbles of a gravekeeper,
the road’s end approaches, waving into vision in the heat mirage,
the guard turns the key and slowly opens the door,
I slam the brakes and park at the edge of the ravine,
slide on my heels to the bank of the creek and there—
just a wisp of hair, and the stale scent of spirits. -
A desert with a clouded sky, nearing dusk—
a lonely car clings to the road as its headlights replace the light of the sun,
rolling deeper into night
as the sand-blasted mile markers grow more rusted and vague.A shipyard and a wharf, long since abandoned—
old chains hang from the cranes and clink together in the wind.
Distantly, new growth flickers in the warm evening twilight
while decay and tide swallow the platforms and piers.A city drowned, whose spires,
once reaching toward heaven with modernist pride and effort,
now are battered by ocean waves.
Algae grows on penthouse windows;
shop displays at street level have given way to pressure and time,
creating a reef of clothing racks and sullied dresses.
A sunken SUV is home to a timid school of fish,
swimming inside by the depth-crushed windows’ gaping maws
to hide from predators. They don’t know the machine brought on the flood,
but they don’t care either.Back in the desert, the wagon rumbles down the road.
A springside hamlet crops up on the horizon.
Their population sign is faded,
but you can tell by the spacing of the remains of the digits
that they never numbered greater than the hundreds.
Tumbleweeds look to be praying at the roadside,
like hair on the heads of buried giants.
Water still flows from the spring, a patch of green in a vast tan land.
An old gas station wilts; the canopy is not to be trusted.
The driver finds a jerry can inside, red for gasoline.
Spring and pump, both his thirst and the car’s are quenched.And the shipyard—
the struts and supports and scaffolds are wrenched with rot.
Gulls perch on girders, resting after their evening meal.
The old steel groans the way an old man rises from his armchair,
and as the old do,
it collapses—
thrown to the deep as the gulls take wing.
They will find a new perch,
the crane will not.And in the lost city—
the highest tower raises an outstretched aerial above the roar of the tides,
holding a sunbleached flag, like a dress abandoned on a desert clothesline,
pure and somber as it flaps in the wind, devoid of humankind to taint it with meaning.
What stripes were borne on its canvas now remain unknown.But the windswept wayfarer carries on.
The wheels push the ground away, revolution after another—
grit hangs in the sipes of the tires.
And the yellow dotted line stretches to infinity—an asymptote toward a destination inexact.
The road gently bends like a graph,
or like the low relief semicircles on the gauges:
revolutions per minute,
miles per hour,
gallons.
The engineers who drew the plans for this tarmac so many years ago
never knew they would force a man to race his own machine
just to see who starves first.·
This free verse poem was the original form of Ancient Copper Statues, and served as collage material for Jenamarie Boots’s artist residency at Petrified Forest National Park.
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The day’s wind sets with the sun,
no longer whistling through the red-dusted canyon crevices.
A woman stands nigh the cliff’s edge,
on the teeth of a half-open jaw. Her hair flutters in the fading breeze,
like cardinals waiting for the right time to strike the air with their wings,
and beat back the low and lonesome ground.
It’s breathtaking, but remember to breathe.Far and away, alone, along the seashore,
stray dogs rip trails and wag tails through the sand wet by plunging breakers.
The beachgoers are gone for the season but their litter shall remain.
Pawprints fade in the swash.A sign rests stoutly nailed to a boardwalk railing:
KEEP OUR BEACHES CLEAN
Snap pictures. Take seashells. Leave footprints.
All it needed was nothing more.
In the trough of the canyon, an ancient stream—
red like the iron in the sandstone walls, but not a drop of blood spilt.
Eyes from cliffside gaze below, rapt and intentful. A pair of shoes is lifted
and set in reverse, their inhabitants following orders to quell
a tumultuous urge to flee the danger of heights.
The woman with the cardinal hair turns her eyes skyward.
Twilight invites stars, and stars slowly arrive.The waterfront is carved by twin borders, black and blue. Highway 264,
here a pleasant city boulevard, transforms along the miles.
Concrete risers give way to road rage and apotheosis, for the flyover ramps
let us all believe for a moment we are aviators, astronauts, gods.
Traffic is light, though an ambulance screams its way to the scene
of another crash.
Avaricious, arrogant gods.But the pilgrim lies on her back, on a blanket she brought from her youth.
A half-full canteen lies next to her arm,
stretched out to her side and the edge of the blanket.
Her car is some six miles from the gorge. The autumn air is cool and
nighttime has arrived, stars in tow. She packed a tent, but left it—
better to spare the heft and favor the water.
Her backpack sits upon a dusty dirt patch.
Food and water.
Map and compass.In the morning, she is gone,
footprints soon to fade in her wake.
Down the steps and switchbacks, a brisk hike away,
the car undramatically shudders to life.The road what brought her here will remember the ground,
the pilgrim will remember to breathe,
and the canyon, neither.·
This free verse poem was the original form of Pilots and Astronauts, and served as collage material for Jenamarie Boots’s artist residency at Petrified Forest National Park.
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The ship whines like old wounds—distractions. Life lies within. Through the hull, through the ashes. It is unlike the last—a garden, not a tomb.
The sister of the Echani cuts the air with her hand, and I feel the ripples across the ship—heat of many sources in each movement. She cannot sense that I watch her.
Not yet.
The Exile approaches. Her gait is thunder, heard and felt from far away, but when she reaches the boarding ramp, all is silent—a mirror of Katarr. An echo. A pain, buried.
I cannot weep for want of eyes.
·
Originally posted on Archive of Our Own.
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A desert with a clouded sky, nearing dusk.
A man drinks in the miles with a cracked glass.
Are all the road’s old markers stained with rust?
The tires scatter pebbles as they pass.
But the wayfarer, the driver, presses on.
The sulfur-spring towns left at the roadside.
The people of the tumbleweeds dried and gone,
for only in death does our thirst subside.He once traveled to a city in the sea,
ancient copper statues treading water.
Dresses hang in clothing rack coral reefs
and algae spreads on the roofs of SUVs.
The shipyard on the coastline withers wide.
The chains of long-loved labors only wind chimes.
Decay left its lipstick on the skyscraper’s side
and only now our clocks run out of time.On the tallest tower’s peak he sees a flag—
a sunbleached summer dress, a broken clothesline,
riches borne of concrete turned to rags,
and faded letters on the city’s signs.
And the shipyard creaks and groans like an old man,
with buckled legs, now rising from his armchair.
Gulls building their nests in a former city plan,
but when it finally falls they’ll have the air.And the traveler will soon tire as he goes,
cursing faded gauges on the cluster in the dash.
He traces yellow lines like asymptotes
and leaves a trail of soot and dirt and ash.
But when the engineers to draw these plans convened,
they never knew the hardest truths of tarmac—
they would force a man to race his own machine just to see
whose lips at first of thirst would crack.