These words don’t mean anything.
Don’t listen any further.
Don’t feel any obligation to pay attention to me, because I’m just rambling.
And I don’t believe in this voice enough to sing, to shout, to scream, even though that’s all I want to do.
Stand at a microphone under hot lights, blinding lights, and claw at my clothes and be someone other than me, be somewhere other than here, because 2007 is not 1981.
And 1981 is not February, 1980, it’s just some arbitrary year that I suspect was cool because it conjures up images of X and Dodger Stadium and something more than February 1980 when I was just an embryo reminiscent of hope, just a life to replace a death that will never mean anything more than history to me.
See, I was this sort of sunrise, some sort of second chance, I suppose, but probably, at the time, I was just a way out. I’m an adult now; I can make these sorts of assumptions.
I almost drowned twice, early on. The first time I was being lulled to the sea, waves rolling over me, the ocean ultimately stealing my something or other.
But me, I was retrieved.
When I was a little older, I was aware enough to know that I wanted a life in front of a microphone. Oh, I got it, plunked in front of that tall pole in my cousin’s recording studio, but I froze, because I wasn’t ready for you to hear my voice, and if you catch me singing now, it’s like a minotaur, and you had better know that chance dances away before you realize what you just witnessed.
So darling, you’re stuck with my words glued to the page, scrawled, scratched, bleeding messy puddles of ink traveling down the gutters of relevance and innocence and violence, because somehow I am a culmination of all of that, even if I am told otherwise, even if the truth is denied. There are certain harsh facts, and while they usually are hidden deep inside my hazel eyes, they are still California truths.
Someone in my family was executed in the days before I was conceived and perceive what you will from that knowledge. I do not claim to be a replacement for an uncle I’ll never know, a brother that will never show, a son never forgotten but whose name was recalled like he just stepped out for a bit, and it affects me even if no one ever talks about it.
Maybe things would’ve been different, maybe I’d be confident, maybe I’d be able to sing some good into the hearts of those who hoped, maybe there’d still be X and Dodger Stadium and 10 Freeways not littered with Mustang glass and such, and maybe none of this really adds up, maybe it’s just speculation, trying to cover up desperation like you try to cover up horror with an adult hand over child eyes, never enough, because the kid always sees through the cracks.
And so will I ever be whole or just a sum of parts making no sense or a history no one speaks, a timeline filled with holes?
And here we are, crop circle, nothing making sense except for me trying to explain how I’ve been affected by affections and acceptions and exceptions to standard rules of family and truths.
And here’s the truth. I’m aware and wary and weary of all that is not told, all that is not sang, and all that is sang repeatedly, as though our only history lay in the confines of a guitar pick on Christmas instead of smoking cigarettes in a Los Angeles parking lot.
And so there I was born.
