* Dead Soul Rising

As I backstroke through the last few years of my life, swimming slowly through passages that I cannot chart with certainty, I am shaken by the absence of passion. The kind of hunger that grows in your stomach, up your chest and to your brain; a fierce pin prick that makes your teeth clench in hot determination. The kind of yearning that drives you to California with your fingers pressed tightly against the steering wheel of a dusty, old van with blistered tinted windows and a radio that never stops playing 'Don't Stop Believing'. Yes, that kind of passion is a thousand rivers away, floating downstream with the girl I used to be; if only I could slip into her eyes and find my way back?

So many times over these last couple of years I have cursed the 'bad luck' that made me fall in love with song. Unlike the work of a carpenter or a doctor, music is poorly rewarded work, failing more often then succeeding. Artists labor under a murderous sense of glorious self-delusion and when the bubble bursts the passionate heart starts to slowly melt like an ice cube sitting in a cool glass of lemonade on a hot summer day. We are brought face to face with the madness of what we are trying to accomplish and we are suddenly aware of the sound, the 'click,' click,' 'clicking' of the clock running down. I have had the dream; I have felt the magic spell of imagination and I am mortal once again. It is this mortality; the mortality of my dream that I mourn so deeply.

The young dreamer stumbling home from parties and chasing unfetchable boys; moving into cheap apartments with a single suitcase and experimenting with love and self-expression, she turns 30 in September. Damn! Where has her 15 minutes gone? and what relevant matter stains the pages of her life? She has robbed herself of time in her attempts to out run it and now it's snapping at her heels like a savage blood hound. She is tired. Exhausted! Her soul has been broken like a wild horse by her own monstrous ambitions and she is in desperate need of a revival.....

The wind is changing. It blows south, toward the warmth of a summer evening. I slip off my skin, heavy like a winter coat, and step into the breeze, naked and fresh. The sun is up and the world looks ugly and yet beautiful, 'like a deer running from the hunter'. Time has no meaning. I have all the time in the world. I think I will strum my guitar and picture the smoky coil of an October bonfire.

*Title courteousy of Sang Kim.