Cliché

As with the last post, I’m again posting a reading of a poem. I hope you’ll enjoy it. It’s part self-criticism, part making crappy ideas work for me. It’s a reflection of frustration with being unable to come up with unoriginal thoughts and then kind of saying, well, if that’s all I’ve got to work with, let’s do this anyway.

http://assets.tumblr.com/swf/video_player.swf?22

As with the last post, I’m again posting a reading of a poem. I hope you’ll enjoy it. It’s part self-criticism, part making crappy ideas work for me. It’s a reflection of frustration with being unable to come up with unoriginal

 

Cliché

From the rising of the sun

To the setting of the same

I will fill my poem

With plethora of cliché

I’ll be preachy with my wording

Throw my beliefs in your face

When you’re bad, I feel better

Who needs tact or grace?

Or perhaps I’ll tell you about my motherland

And how I miss it so

But I’ve never actually been there

And really, I hate the snow.

I could tell about the tribulations

Of what it means to be a writer

While I live in privilege

And pain is one all-nighter

I could write of adolescent love

Convince you that it’s real

Teach you it’s a feeling

A heartbeat and sex appeal.

I could write some lines of politics

I’m sure that I’d be right

Thousands of years of man’s problems

I’ve solved them in one night.

I know it all sounds cynical

But I assure you it is not.

I want my words to make a difference

But clichés are all I’ve got

 

 

(c) 2011

Joshua Murray

Muse(ings) 6.5

A coffee shop and conversation on a Monday night. There’s a storm brewing outside and it makes the coffee better somehow.  Behind the counter, she can hold a conversation with anyone. At the counter myself, I can write anything I want. It might get read, it might not. I can share it, I can keep it hidden; it doesn’t matter. What matters is that life is vivid. It is vital. Literally. And I mean literally literally. I have to say that, because literally, like love, is overused and abused as a term. Life, love, and vitality. All go up in flames. Burning like calories.  If the calories don’t burn you just get fat. And if you get fat, you have a hard time running. You get lethargic and everything becomes stale.

Don’t let things get stale. Stale bread, stale coffee, stale life. It’s crumbles and tastes terrible.

Muse(ings) 4

It’s funny how inspiration to write comes and goes. Like now: I have no real inspiration. I don’t even know what to write. I could write about love, and the lack thereof. I could write about coffee and my love thereof. I could write about music, perhaps even offer a review of some new album—though I usually do that while listening to the given album, and I’ve been without a portable music player for months now. It’s quite an experience. I haven’t been without portable music in years.

It seems that the world has its own soundtrack separate from what I hear from my sound isolating earphones—sounds of leaves rustling, of voices in every octave and key—some from people and some from what people have made, and some from what no person could ever craft. I wish I could say that it’s opened up a world of conversations with others that I had forgotten were possible, but that’s not quite true. But it is freeing in its own way. When you don’t have 30 gigabytes of music files you can take with you everywhere you go, you tune in to other things, maybe a radio station playing a new artist worth hearing (thanks for playing Cage the Elephant, WNRN—you stay classy), or maybe just your own thoughts. After all, it can be hard to process your own thoughts when you incessantly drown them out in waves of sound. What serves as inspiration so often can be its own hindrance to expression if applied too liberally. Maybe I haven’t been as intentional as I should be with this opportunity to hear the world’s soundtrack; it has some lovely melodies to be heard—melodies of baby squeals, banana peels, drum fills, and various other thrills.

Speaking of intentionality, I’ve found myself losing such in the last few weeks. Twice I’ve had complete strangers stop me while I was entering or exiting my truck and ask me for a ride to somewhere. Neither person was threatening, but it either time, it struck me as exceedingly odd. Maybe it’s because I’ve never been a man about town until recently, but I’ve never been flagged down by a stranger for a ride before (unless it was a fellow college student on campus at Liberty). Both times, I thought to myself, I should let this be an opportunity to share Christ and be unashamed—after all, if they were unashamed enough to ask a stranger for a favor, couldn’t I be unashamed enough to share what I live for? I don’t know, and I won’t beat myself up too much, but I could have said so much more than “God bless” or “be blessed in the name of Jesus.” I have so much to learn; I’ve asked God for opportunities, and he’s given them, only for me to panic and ignore them.

By the way, for the 20 some people who read my writing without commenting…. you could try commenting—let me know what you like and dislike, what you agree and disagree with, what repulses you or resonates with you.

The Pearl Pt. 2 will hopefully be coming forth soon, but we’ll see. As for Muse(ings) 4, I guess i figured out what to write about.