Poetry and Paper Tigers.

Debate doesn’t really change things. It gets you bogged in deeper. If you can address or reopen the subject with something new, something from a different angle, then there is some hope.... That’s something poetry can do for you, it can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities.

SEAMUS HEANEY, Paris Review, Fall 1997

When in doubt, give thanks. Survey the surface of your life and then go deeper. There are worlds within people, within a song, within a face, within a breakfast. These intricacies are the things that make life, life.

We talk about perspicacity as the kind of thing a good coach needs to get better. It's something you can have naturally, but it's also something you learn the further you go along. You learn that a slight movement of the knee in on the first pull of a clean will snub the right muscle groups. You learn that the same loss of that movement on the push out of the bottom of the front squat will short-change the max clean.

We all learn to see as we go along. Until then, we are blind.

It's incredible to think about all the things you know without being able to voice them. I feel sometimes, that I have forgotten what that is like - to name a thing for what it is... in spite of your incomprehension of it, in spite of your fear of it perhaps, in spite of the fact that words, are like paper tigers.

I've been trying to write more poetry lately - mainly for the sake of recording some songs with a friend in the wee hours of the morning. The process feels so new, and so different than my oh-so-college-ey days back in the shed behind Mark Stevick's house. Sip a beer, pour out your words, or melt into someone else's.

Poetry, for me, is allowing a voice to speak that I am not aware of. The words fall to a page and seem to write themselves. The sounds drift together and create a harmony that feels self-taught. There is something in me that wants to speak and stanza to stanza, I let it.

Sometimes the words don't come and on those days... I know not to try.

Maybe relationships are like this... Maybe sometimes you realize it is time to call a thing what it is. Maybe sometimes you know there are no words and there never will be. Only sounds that cry like a baby, so vividly but without any clear meaning.

Either way, there is, in the mix, gratitude for the voice, for the sun, for those things you know are there even if you can't yet see them. Maybe that's called poetry. Maybe that's called faith.

"We're just holding on to nothing

To see how long nothing lasts."

-Beck, Paper Tiger