I wear the warm
It’s the Sun and it’s the last
Little bit
During that morning where I
Had my head on your lap
The night came
While we wait
For the next time around
The strings remain tight
But now I have someone else
Put it around my neck.

What I think about when I’m running
I say, ’see you later’ and I’m climbing
Over quicksand, hills and nowhere
But I think it’s almost over and I’m
Always half right, but I keep this in mind.

Art by Danna Ray

From “The American Scholar” by R.W. Emerson

These being his functions, it becomes him to feel all confidence in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He and he only knows the world. The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if all depended on this particular up or down. The odds are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach; and bide his own time, — happy enough, if he can satisfy himself alone, that this day he has seen something truly. Success treads on every right step. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns, that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds. He learns that he who has mastered any law in his private thoughts, is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks, and of all into whose language his own can be translated. The poet, in utter solitude remembering his spontaneous thoughts and recording them, is found to have recorded that, which men in crowded cities find true for them also. The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank confessions, — his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses, — until he finds that he is the complement of his hearers; — that they drink his words because he fulfils for them their own nature; the deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his wonder he finds, this is the most acceptable, most public, and universally true. The people delight in it; the better part of every man feels, This is my music; this is myself.

And It turns out
We’re just a little
Out of order so we’ll
Just keep traveling
But it turns out we’ve
Forgotten names
Or if not so,
Then here I hit it right.

Swimming in a monsoon
And soon I’ll be washed out
I’ll be far out to sea
Where I’ll stare up
Into where I’ll be a part
Of tales of whales
Where I won’t have to say much
But I’ll just float on my back.

My head’s a little volcano
Fireballs have chased the
Words out and there’s nothing
Left but smoke.

Save this one for maybe the day
When I’ve got you on my back
And we’re waiting for that moon
When we’re half awake and sleepy
I’ll let you play the cymbals
While I play the trumpet
It’s our year and let me show
You how to stand on my trunk
And you show me how to make
Some sweet sushi before we
Get back on our trail.

Save this one for maybe tonight
When I catch the train and get
To Keele I’ll phone you and by
That time maybe the roads will
Be clear and we can listen to
The new Asobi Seksu, then we’ll
Get lost in Lost and I’ll tell
You to calm down when you get
Too excited, hold those legs
So they stop shaking.

I spent that whole summer rummaging
And it became a routine every evening
When I’d ride along the same streets
From one end back to the other
Maybe there were those missing days
Between us and as I rode in the evenings
It just so happens that it just turned
Morning there often when you’d ride too.

You had some wine
That night and words
Whom I met in my sleep
And I shook their hands
Met many days more
Where I’d spend some time
Reading letters and
Of course, waiting
In afternoons.