associations

solid marble eyes
lead fingertips
cement feet
driftwood lips

full books
of images
of empty
pages

inkstained
inside cheeks
soles of feet

lick or choke on
lollipop words

icecubes
frame blanket
burritos

slow show
dance
around tell

top tracks, icepacked.

i realized i never did my year-end post of the top tunes that i self-soundtracked my 2012 with. so, here ya goes, party peoples.

1. The Cinematic Orchestra – To Build a Home
2. Busby Marou – Not Fire Not Ice
3. Boy & Bear – Fall At Your Feet
4. Communist Daughter – Not the Kid
5. The Band – Tears Of Rage
6. Emma Louise – Jungle
7. Communist Daughter – Ghosts
8. Sparklehorse – Mountains
9. The Clientele – Ariadne Sleeping
10. Emma Pollock – Hug The Piano
11. Paul Kelly & Angus Stone – Four Seasons In One Day
12. Busby Marou – Better Be Home Soon
13. Lior & Emma-Louise – It's Only Natural
14. Communist Daughter – Speed Of Sound
15. Tinpan Orange – Like Snow
16. The Clientele – Policeman Getting Lost
17. Seth Sentry – Float Away
18. Mojave 3 – In Love with a View
19. Broadcast – Winter Now
20. Crowded House – Throw Your Arms Around Me
21. Seth Sentry – Dear Science
22. Crowded House – Fall At Your Feet
23. José González – Save Your Day
24. The Jezabels – Dark Storm
25. The Panics – Get Us Home
26. Angus Stone – River

let's just say 2012 was a year full of nostalgia and mellow tunes and aussie artists. so deal with it. i gotta find some new tunes for 2013.

but, i do want to share some of the sweet new stuff i found in 2012, even if i didn't listen to it as much as my sissy girly nostalgia music...these are definitely worth checking out!

• A.C. Newman - Encyclopedia of Classic Takedowns
• Beach House - Myth
• Bobby Womack - Please Forgive My Heart
• Bombadil - Laundromat
• Callers - Heroes
• Cat Power - Ruin
• Deep Sea Arcade - Girls
• Delicate Cutters - You Want Her
• Dent May - Best Friends
• Dirty Fences - Sid
• Dot Hacker - Inhibition
• Dylan LeBlanc - Part One: The End
• El Perro Del Mar - Hold Off The Dawn
• Electric Guest - American Daydream
• Father John Misty - Nancy From Now On
• Field Report - I'm Not Waiting Anymore
• The Hello Sequence - October
• Infantree - Fibber
• Islands - Hallways
• Jeans Wilder - Limeade
• Kate Miller-Heidke - Ride This Feeling
• Lasorda - No Intent To Return
• Shovels & Rope - Birmingham
• Anders Osborne - When Will I See You Again
• Capybara - Neighbor Crimes
• Civil Twilight - Doorway
• The Cloud Room - Crashing In Love
• Cold Specks - Holland
• Great Lake Swimmers - Easy Come Easy Go
• Mmoths - Heart (feat. Keep Shelly In Athens)
• Blessed Feathers - By Song Through The Americas
• Bright Moments - Travelers
• The Duke Spirit - Don't Wait
• Emily Wells - Passenger
• Eternal Summers - Millions
• Justin Townes Earl - Look The Other Way
• Lee Ranaldo - Off The Wall
• Lost In The Trees - Red
• The Lumineers - Flowers In Your Hair

Aloud

Early yesterday, my friend Jared linked to me a youtube video of a spoken word poem called "To This Day" by Shane Koyczan, animated as a project by a bunch of artists. It really moved me, mostly because of how much I related to it. And it got me thinking about how I haven't really done much spoken word stuff, not with my poetry or my writing. I don't know why I haven't, other than I hadn't thought about it. It's not like there are open mic nights and stuff  for poetry around where I live, or if there are, I haven't heard of them. But I liked being able to hear a poem as read by the author. I like the layer it adds, the inflection and sound affecting the way the poem is received, instead of the one layer of just reading it for yourself. I remember feeling this way the first time I heard Dylan Thomas reading his poetry, the way he emphasized certain parts above others, differently than the way I emphasized them in my head. I recall recording a couple of poems after hearing him back in 2006 or 2007. Never did anything with them because I hated the way they sounded, but I think it's important, in some respects, for an artist, especially one who creates things as a record of their own perceptions, to give as much personal paradigm to their work as possible. If you're expressing yourself, express yourself in ALL the ways, I guess.

Anyway, when I got home late late late last night, I started recording some of my poems. It surprised me, there are parts of them where reading them out loud really moved me, and I can hear my voice break, and recall that I started crying at one part where I had never cried before, in writing OR reading it. And just as different poems are written in different tones, they're read in different tones. Anyway, now I'm just trying to figure out how to link them here for you, just in case you're interested. Maybe SoundCloud will work. But yeah... experimenting... and these are totally unedited. so, soz for sound quality.

perpetuity


i have been you


ten nine


ten three

perpetuity

perpetual rule,
never bent
always broken:

always write! you say
put it down every day,
but stuff gets in the way
so you stay,

tread water.
and by water i mean
excuses.

and by you i mean
me.
and by tread, i mean
make them up
every second,

every second time
it crosses your mind.
you wanna unwind.

and writing things
just ties the strings

tighter, and tighter
imaginate
asphyxiate
tunnelend light
gets brighter.
here's the insider

scoop:
more cyclical loop
the loop

overturn
the gutchurn
heart burn
wordspurn.

make it a constant
instead of a dissonant
evict the head tenants

knucklecrack
word crunch
keyboard hunch
head bent
time spent

worthwhile
creative purge
play over the
daily dirge
of duty & the grey
runaway

find a smooth hollow
in a white page
and rampage or
just age

time to stop
got the word drop
too much hip
hop

this week.

shuffle
skip
repeat.

indigo evening

indigo evening
wraps memory
tight enough to
constrict me,

inhale efforts
but no room in
my chest.

ghosts of you
burn behind eyes
escape in swim
& tears.

arms ache down
to fingertips
to unwrap
tight memory.
unravel.
undo.

indigo evening
so full of longing
it can only be
empty.

wrapped in all
which cannot be
rewoven.

ghosts of you
press heavy on emptiness,
break into dreams
for years.

for years.

a batch of sort-of conversation hearts...

wonderlust

i've been so busy trying to take off with an art career, or a potential art career, that all my freetime and my insomnia time is devoured by the things that i "have to be doing" instead of the things that i should be doing, like maintaining my writing.

it's hard to write when i'm not depressed sometimes. and it's hard to be depressed when i don't have time for it lately, but it's easy to be depressed when valentines day rolls around for the third single year in a row. my winter melancholies hit me like a ton of bricks this weekend, and though i want to just go home and crawl into bed after work, i'm going to be up working all night on a drawing that i promised i'd do for a friend to give to his girlfriend for the aforementioned holiday.

work's been busy, but i'm grabbing a minute to write, because in between phone calls i've been reading my friend jonathan's blog, which i've needed to catch up on for a while. i feel like a jerk friend for not reaching out to anyone lately, especially not to old, dear friends who mean more to me than most people. there was a bit from one of his posts that stuck to me:

"dreams have the last laugh - still i prefer those laughs to the cruelty of the self-reflecting mind on the fringes of sleep - that's when the ghosts devour me, that's the only time they can"

it stuck because it so perfectly worded my thought process of late, and why i've been can't-sleeping for weeks now. i shouldn't be surprised, jonathan's always had the right words for things.

and now, images, or images of other people's words, because i can't words on my own anymore today.