Jim's Politics

I saw Jim’s jaw tighten when he sang about a growing movement- larger circles of men joining together to bring light into the darkness, to bring sweet nectar into the upturned open mouths of gaping need. Now is the moment. Capture this will-never-come again day. Take back what was before. Don’t you know this is the last chance?

A candle burned in a small bowl that he had placed at the center of our circle, a deliberate placement, slow, silent, to say we are starting here, today, together.
For my part, I sank into the chair and lowered the bill of my hat as Jim pulled farther out front. A man to the left of me shifted and a second tipped his bottle to his lips.

I sang back to Jim from my inside voice- a soft caress of contradiction. You want and others want and everyone needs and no one can find the nectar that will forever quench this thirst. Momentum comes without brave horns and clatter of campaigns.
Momentum that precedes change accrues through the little by little, instant by instant, small one-day-at-a-time slips toward the fault. We will both be surprised at the shape and instance of its arrival.

What I wish for, Jim, is a singer who sings of beginning and end as points in a much longer line, who sings in a gut-punching chant as they must have back and back, before memory and on past even the inception of language, where words and concepts make no attempt to instill an illusion of shape-

Do you know any songs like that?

January 17, 2010