The toughest thing to do in life is to let go of someone or let something be. We are given a mind and in our minds are memories, some fade with time and some become more vivid with time. Holding on and remembering can be a way of connecting with the past but it is also a way of not moving on in the future. You can't live in your memories and live in the present. I know I have tried. New memories slip through your fingers like sand through the hour glass. The only thing you lose is time and it is your most important ally. When you are young each year is a small percentage of the years you have left but as you get older this percentage becomes greater. But it doesn't mean that you still can't make changes. Say I have 40 years left, this year would be 2.5% of the rest of my life, 2.5% is a small number, assuming I can accomplish a lot of the changes I want to. The longer I wait this percentage gets greater, taking a year to make changes at 40 would be using 3.33% of the rest of my life. I guess what I am trying to say is it is never too late to use time instead of letting it use you. If I want I can be a better person at 31, 32, 33 and so on than I am at 30. It is just a matter of letting go of the things I can't change now. I think I am getting good at this but there are setbacks. Success is not letting one bad day become two and so on. I wish I was a stronger person but I guess just believing that I can be a better person will have to do for now.
"Picture yourself in a boat on a river, with tangerine trees and marmalade skies, somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly, a girl with kaleidoscope eyes...."
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Q7AgIEfBq_Q
When I sit down to write poetry or my version of poetry, I like to have a cup of tea, a sharp pencil (though I do all my writing on the computer) and music playing softly. I try not to let the music influence my writing too much but it inevitably does, so parts of songs or references to songs become part of the writing. I like to twist things around and take the piece wherever the song takes me. It is not clever or good but like all songs, there are stories behind my poetry. The great Robert Frost said "I never started a poem yet whose end I knew, writing a poem is discovering." I am the same and have no idea where my writing will take me. I do know certain things, it is usually going to have elements of nature and the weather, references to musicians or their lyrics, and memories of girls I thought I loved once and how wrong I was about that. The poem I wrote last night is called Life Must Follow Its Calendars and contains traces of The Beatles Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.
Life Must Follow Its Calendars
She unfolds her arms
Ample cleavage becoming exposed
The sun returns like a voyeur
Smiling brighter than earlier
I am a shadow in her beauty
Carefully happy and inspired
By a presence previously written
May will be returning tomorrow
April will be departing tonight
Life must follow its calendars
The breeze is slight and cool
My skin no longer feels foreign
Lucy plays in the sky above
A beetle crosses the ground below
Her eyes sparkle like diamonds
I am transformed and delirious
Suddenly absorbed with words
Previously unspoken but written
She unlocks my passion
Tears of pain explode
Bombs are quieter and safer
Where do I go without my ammunition
The real and imagined hurt
Could it simply not be needed
Has enough time passed
A fire done burning its victims
The sun dies like a lover
Beautifully colouring our sky
Lucy comes down from above
Another beetle rises from below
Her eyes disappear like bullets
I am dead or dying
Suddenly absorbed with loss
Previously unfelt but now felt
The moon is my voyeur
Illuminating less than yesterday
She will not be my lover
There are only numbers on a napkin
A name and an opportunity
I would never take advantage of.
04/30/08
"So we sailed on to the sun, till we found a sea of green, and we lived beneath the waves, in our yellow submarine......."
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZIjZtgyPhS0
In February of 2007, a fishing boat combing Antarctic waters accidentally captured a colossal squid. The story has just exploded this week, over a year later, as they have decided to thaw it or it is finally thawing. Either way, scientists from around the world are mesmerized by this squid currently being held at a museum in New Zealand. The squid is 1090 pounds and if it were alive its eyeballs would be the size of beach balls. The intriguing part of the story is that the scientists believe there are even bigger squids lurking in the depths of our oceans. Nature will never stop puzzling us and if it does, it will only be because humans are extinct. A link to the story is below.
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/080430/oddities/nzealand_environment_animals_squid_1
Not a perfect lead in but if you haven't seen the movie The Squid and The Whale you really should. The movie isn't about squids or whales but they are used as metaphors. It stars Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney. Below is a link to its page on Imdb.com, ignore the ignoramus who reviewed it and gave it a 2 when the average user gave it 7.7. There is always someone who just doesn't like a movie, which is their right and I am sure their favourite movie is Feel The Noise or something like that, its average rating is 1.6.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0367089/
"Imagine there's no countries, it isn't hard to do, nothing to kill or die for...."
http://youtube.com/watch?v=H7_6Vzj7Rng
I have been reading Half A Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for nearly 2 weeks now and have about 50 pages left. The story as I have explained before follows the lives of 5 characters through Biafra's unsuccessful bid for independence from Nigeria. There are many poignant observations about war, life and the world as it was in the late 1960's but I can't quote them all, so you should find a copy of the book. It is interesting through that there have been 2 references to the characters listening to or singing along to the Beatles music. The reach of their music in a world without today's technology and its relevance on the African continent, which was physically and culturally miles away from America and England is amazing. The following poem is part of the book.
"Were You Silent When We Died?"
Did you see photos in sixty-eight
Of children with their hair becoming rust:
Sickly patches nestled on those small heads.
Then falling off, like rotten leaves on dust?
Imagine children with arms like toothpicks,
With footballs for bellies and skin stretched thin.
It was kwashiorkor-difficult word.
A word that was not quite ugly enough, a sin.
You needn't imagine. There were photos
Displayed in gloss-filled pages of your Life.
Did you see? Did you feel sorry briefly,
Then turn round to hold your lover or wife?
Their skin had turned the tawny of weak tea
And showed cobwebs of vein and brittle bone:
Naked children laughing, as if the man
Would not take photos and then leave, alone.
The book mentions the disease Kwashiorkor often and I wasn't sure what it was exactly, so I had to look it up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwashiorkor
"Sounds of laughter shades of life are ringing through my open ears, exciting and inviting me, limitless undying love which shines around me like a million suns, it calls me on and on across the universe......."
http://youtube.com/watch?v=JqRxi6G7Dro
The saddest and the most inspiration aspect of reading a novel like Half Of A Yellow Sun is that they continue living and laughing, even if it is not a vibrant as it was previously, their love has limits because in my opinion no human can love without limtis, but it does shine even as the bodies are burned, abandoned or buried. The hurt and loss felt by the characters in the book might be the type that you can't let it be. I hope to never know but there are things I can let be.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=67J_66hdN-I
John.
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