Joie de Vivre

I wish that I had something to say.
Do I have anything to say?
What should I say, do I have a voice, do I use it?
   Should I use it?
So many that have gone before me have spoken,
   have seen the world they live in, and spoken out loud.
I feel compelled to speak, to have a voice.
   Am I the complacent silent?
   Are we?
What would we speak about?  
 
To write the words of the poet
To sing the songs of the lover
To dream all my dreams out loud
To paint all the waves of the artist
To shine all the light of the eye
To show all the scenes of my dream
  
Let the words fly, let the songs out
Let the cameras roll, don't close your eyes
When I go,
I want to go with my hands all messy with paint
'cause I didn't get all washed away.
 

Somewhere I've been
Maybe just who I am
I was made to hold,  
but only so much;
I can't hold it any more.
 
An artist, a musician, a poet,  
Some read my words
Some see my images
Many more my work: moving frames and sound
Yet
Few have seen the paint from my own fingers:
   wrapped away in some closet, dusty and dim
Few are they who hear my voice
And no one hears my song.


I do not speak
I do not shout
I sing where none can listen
I dream alone in my bed

 
Yesterday,  
I heard songs
Real and live
New and shy
they were sung and we heard it
we felt it and we knew it
we said it should be heard on stage,
   recorded on an album: 15 songs, someone said.
I was glad that she had played.
But, oh, how I ached deep, deep, deep within.
I held a guitar in my lap, with no skill to play
I held air in my lungs, with no words to say
If I could just SCREAM and let it out,
   I would have, but I couldn't;
 I almost walked outside and tried
If I could peel back my skin
   so all who need to see would see...
I don't even know what it looks like, what it is
But it must come out
it must
It Must
IT MUST
Be spoken,
Written,
Captured and Displayed
It must be sung.
Is it even written?
   Did I write it?
   Was it written long ago?
  
This happens every time.
It's not the first
and it won't be the last.
Continually I seek out
the rooms where the music plays.
It is there that I am haunted  
I am captured  
I am where I know that I must be
then
I am alive
 

 
Alive, but ready to explode
Eager for my seams to burst
For my fragile frame to shatter,
spilling music everywhere.

 
I can't express
can't bring it to life
God, what would you have me to say?
You who made me for this
And formed me for this
You who know me
must know  
what I must know to do
 

Oh, how music stirs my heart and inspires me to play, to create, to take pictures, to make movies, to write poems, to sing songs, to write stories, to bring all my dreams into life. But, I can't, or I won't. I am moses before the burning bush, but I don't want to settle for Aaron's voice. I am Samuel hearing my name called in the night; I don't want to fear authority punished. I am Zechariah with John's name on my tung, but I don't want to wait nine months. I am full of song but cannot sing. I have seen a vision but cannot speak.

I am suddenly a guitar player who finds he has no arms. I am a mute with something urgent that must be said, but I don't even know what it is. All I feel is the urgency of expression and the incapacity to express. I feel that everything that I am, everything that I was made for, shaped for, raised for, every experience in my small strange life has been for something great that I don't know, that I desperately want to know so that I can obey and be at peace. So that I like David, can finish God's purpose in my generation.

But,

I tell Him that I can't. I make no effort to train for that which might be necessary. I have not taught my fingers which strings to hold and which ones to strum. I left the piano on the stage of my junior high school. I dabbled in everything and mastered nothing. I left research unwritten, photos in the dark room, and films on their tapes; images locked away on hard drives with stories untold. Destroyed by my own lazy response to being overwhelmed.

What will it take? I listen and read and watch everything that I can, trying to piece together what has been said, hoping to be fueled and inspired: hoping, hoping, hoping.

“Just start writing!” my mother always said to me, again and again, when I was overwhelmed by some scholastic writing assignment. Maybe that's what I'm doing now, in hopes that something will come to life out of all this jumbled mess.