Reflections

Reflections

I looked in a mirror and didn't see my own reflection...
No, not a trick of light or some transformation to vampirism,
but the person staring back at me was, strangely, not familiar.

I heard my voice and was sure it wasn't mine.
Now I can't claim ownership of words,
but the tone, pitch, pace seemed somehow different.

What happens when you no longer recognize yourself?
when the person you've become is not something you'd want to be?
What happens when what you thought you knew
is somehow,
not familiar, not an opinion you could hold?

What is this thing called self?
Does it even really exist or are we just some trick of light,
some reflection in reality that we thought was real?

What if these questions could never be answered definitively?
Should we even bother asking?

January 19, 2010

Border Rising

Okay, I must admit I like to hang out and drink and smoke and laugh.

Nothing reinforces that then a good road trip with friends. Road trip? Yes, for the debut of the play I'm in, "Border Rising," we took it to a border issues conference in Tucson, AZ. It was in a United Church of Christ sanctuary and packed.

As usual, we stumbled through missed cues and forgotten lines but the play was very well received and powerful. Darryl, Alicia and I laughed at the train wreck that it was and how we navigated it. Outside of Lee and Eric, we were probably the most experienced actors so we had some perspectives that the poets in the play (Manny, Mariah, and Jessica) didn't have and we all kind of liked the train wreck and how it pushes you.

We have 2 more rehearsals this week and then we come back to Silver City, NM to perform it here. Finally we wind up with a 3 day stand in Albuquerque the next week.

How meaning is misconstrued or when words lose their meaning

Colors,
sounds,
smells,
adjectives.

There are words, like these,
that merely string a sentence together,
provide some sort of sense
where otherwise we might provide meaning on our own.

Often times, we provide the meaning even though the words are all in place
correctly,
arranged and spelled in a recognizable way
but then blue becomes a way of describing a mood,
and loud becomes something we see,
and rotten becomes a last name,
instead of the adjectives they are.
How come the "adjective" is actually a noun?

January 12, 2010

Cobwebs

Cobwebs

In the dark, cleaning out cobwebs
is an intuitive jobs,
taking the broom, shop-vac, old t-shirt
to the corners of dark rooms
is either guessing if they're gone or spending so much time
that they disappear on their own and you're left holding
the broom, the shop-vac, the t-shirt,
in the dark corner of a dark room and you're no longer cleaning.

But some things require patience,
require standing still,
require holding and letting the machine do its job.
Like a writer who puts the pen to a blank page
or places his fingers on a keyboard and hopes that
the cobwebs haven't cluttered up too much of his brain
and he remembers how to type,
how to spell words,
how to hit a carriage return
and knows when to stop
and knows when to start again.

January 3rd, 2010

Day 2

Forty four years ago my father worked for the Rio Grande Valley gas company. He was in charge of internal communcation and thus wrote the company newsletter, memos from the administrative staff, etc. From what he tells me, Rio Grande Valley gas company was publicly held and had a lot of assets. So about a year after I was born the gas company was bought and it was not bought by the company that the administrative staff wanted (and by extension my father). So, from what I understand, Dad was out another job and my family was moving. But first Brownsville.

Brownsville, Texas is on the southernmost tip of Texas. A border town, it is a major crossing into Mexico, via Matamoros. At the border there is a couple of different crossings, both flanking the University of Texas at Brownsville/Texas Southmost College.