Answer #20 - Sometimes an essay sparks a song

It's a fine line - the walk between prose writer, songwriter, and poet.  I'll only ever claim songwriter as terra firma, but I dabble in many of forms, including play writing.  Sometimes really badly.  Other times, not so much.  Sometimes a larger idea (or beast) is waiting just beneath the surface, and has to be dealt with before its abstraction can come into being.  Or some such sanctimonious sh*t as that... but the thing is,

Where exactly is this going?

I thought it might be interesting to look at an essay that sparked a song.  Interesting process.  The song that followed remains unrecorded, might make an album someday, but didn't make this one.  I'll post it tomorrow. For now, In my Last Life.

In my last life the curtains were drawn and the ocean's waves landed like giant's feet on a hardwood stage.  I buried bits of wood, carved with my name and birth date all over the back yard and sat at a quiet table in a playhouse, nameless birds chirping bits of secret messages.  I never tried to understand them.  I made mud pies and dreamed of baby dolls sporting hair that grew longer and shorter with the turn of an arm.

I called across the brick wall that separated my neighbors from me - the girl, Ginger, and the boy, Butch - and I heard the sound of engines revving in the driveway across the street.  Tattooed men laughing, boys bursting through the prickly shrubs with footballs and fingers held in Vees, for the peace signs people flashed in parades and marches, and the cigarettes they'd smoke later.

In my last life, monsters made daisy-shaped paw prints in the bathtub and the curtains were always drawn.  The streetlights came on at 8:30 in the summer.  Bikes were strewn on lawns and dogs slept restlessly, chained to backyard trees and immovable posts, dreaming doggy dreams of children wandering near who'd drop bits of half-chewed hot dog and bun; maybe endless dreams of fields of running, steak-shaped rabbits and long, long rivers where dogs swam to the sea.

I dreamed of a giant spider on the wall, they said, when my teeth were coming in, and two years later, told my mother that my grandmother had died, when, in fact, thousands of miles away, she had.  My aunt whispered, conspiratorially, when I, an adolescent, sat gazing over her shoulder at the New York Times crossword puzzle; where I sat in her rococo living room with the thick gold shag carpet and porcelain reproductions of Marie Antoinette and Louis the XIV.  'They never told you, but it's true.. you told her before she got the phone call...'

My only prophecy, but still, dead on.  No one ever asked for an encore.

In my last life, I floated down the river Seine on the back of a porcelain dog, while stone-faced boys lit firecrackers & cigarettes in the deep, black cul-de-saq.  I watched my mother as I drifted by, pulling honeysuckles from the vines, one by one, and pushing them into the empty garden beds.