Learning To Read Pt 6 (Metaphor and The Descent into Sub-Text)

A poem is not always what it seems. There is the apparent story - the text. And the thing we are not talking about when we talk about the story - sub-text.

In this way our conversation between reader and writer can get dangerous. 

and the way to bridge that gap is - metaphor

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this is a series about understanding and improving our ability to write through my experience of becoming a reader. check out parts 1-5 on this page

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When I was young-er and a not so avid reader in middle school we read a poem about blueberries - I've tried to find it but haven't - and I remember it was about blueberries cause I got into an argument with my teacher that went something like this:

teacher - what do you think the poem was about?

me - blueberries

teacher - but what else was it about? maybe the blueberries were a way to talk about something else...

me - why can't a poem just be about blueberries?

teacher - *sigh

Now, I'm sure the poem was about more than blueberries and I'm also sure if I was older than 10 I might have been able to think more critically about blueberries. 

The truth is trying to define sub-text is tricky even now. There is not one answer that works for every reader or writer. Every one can and will read into a poem differently but that's not a problem younger me failed to grasp:

What my younger self failed to understand was the metaphor of the blueberries, or if I remember correctly, picking blueberries. That is, the act of picking blueberries was the subject of the text, and the rail into which I could have begun to descend into the author's sub-text. 

The poet chose blueberries out of all the fruits or vegetables that they could talk about and why can give us a clue about the poem is really about when we talk about blueberries. Maybe they picked blueberries because it was a real life experience, so blueberries was a historical choice, but this would lead us to possible sub-texts like nostalgia, family, youth, nature, innocence, etc. Or maybe blueberry picking is regional and the sub-text can wonder into class, race, gender, history, occupational, etc. Or maybe the blueberry is representative of something bigger like a person, or relationship, or a nation, or a people. 

teacher - so what is the poem about?

This would all be easier if I remembered the rest of the poem, but like I said the metaphor is just the handrail for the descent into the sub-text, not the sub-text itself. So any poem can be read in these different ways and they are not more or less valid just more thoughtful.

younger me - blueberries

me - all I remember are the blueberries

teacher - *sigh

-rene

Learning to Read Pt 5 (Line Breaks)

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This series looks from a readers point of view about how to become a better writer. How I learned to read poetry taught me a lot about how I want to write. Check out parts 1-3.

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Line Breaks might be the most misunderstood concepts in amateur poetry. Many beginner readers/writers, my past self included, think of breaks as serving a singular function. 

Either one of the look of poetry, as in short words in a line looks like poetry:

a poem 

looks 

lik'a poem 

when 

its shape 

looks

like this

or one of idea breaks, as in breaking each line when a thought is complete:

a poem

looks lik'a poem

when its shape

looks like this

Both look like poems because we know they are not written in long format like this sentence. But the truth is that trying to pin down and understand why or how to break lines is less a science or a rule, but an artistic touch. Poems can be full paragraphs. One to several words per line, or even parts of words. They can break at full thoughts, or in the middle of a thought. So where do you begin to understand it?

I once again take it back to reading. 

One of the biggest functions I see across all kinds of line breaks is the question of flow. Or the reason to make a break is to help guide the reader into the tempo of the piece. Is the poem supposed to be fluid and easy? Is it slow and deliberate? Is it fun and whimsical? Or a million other things that the form could be used to represent the ideas of a poem.

If the lines break and clean full thoughts the words become really easy to read. The idea flows as if it was a full prose sentence but almost easier because it is arranged into smaller thoughts. But if the lines are broken erratically, the same words can become difficult and slow.  As in:

a po

em looks 

lik'a po

em when it

s shape

looks

like this

None of these break choices are right or wrong, poetry isn't about that, but they do convey different messages with the same words. They tell a different story. They have a different "voice" (a concept I have issues with but that's for a different post). It really is a matter of flow and flow, to me, comes from concept. 

What is the poem about? 

How should it be read? 

How do I want someone else to read it?

These are all ideas that go through my head when I am writing. Because we know now that even this is a poem:

A poem looks lik'a poem when its shape looks like this.

But what would that tell the audience? Somehow the words lose a bit of meaning when they are written out in a regular prose format. Somehow the idea becomes one dimensional. The voice becomes generic. Not to say those are bad things, just different choices. And every choice in a poem is critical.

The more poems you read, the more you will see how and why other authors have chosen to make these breaks, and how it affects the way you read.

I'd challenge you to take the line "a poem looks" and make you own variations. I'd love to see what you come up with.

much love

-rene

ps. as always like, share, subscribe and if you want to talk you can reach me on this blog, youtube, facebook and twitter. Also my new website ReneTheWriter.

pps. Let me know if you liked this and I can do more.

Learning To Read Pt 3 (Improving Your Writing or The Devil of Detail)

How often do we think we know someone from their work? 

Have you ever read something and felt like the author just got you? That they had some intuitive look into your psyche? If your like me, it happens too many times to count. 

But the more I write the more I come to believe that the opposite is true. Maybe it's not the author that gives words magic, but the reader?

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This series looks from a readers point of view about how to become a better writer. How I learned to read poetry taught me a lot about how I want to write. Check out Part 1, and Part 2.

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One of the first things I did after I decided that poetry reading was something I wanted to do, was read aloud to myself. At my home, pacing back and forth, in my underwear as I read my favorite poems to the furniture.

Trying things out in different inflections. Different voices. It went from uncomfortable, to absurd, to terrible, to ok, to horrible, to ok, and the more I tried to read like somebody else the less sense it all made.

So then I tried not trying. 

And the more I let go of what I thought the reading should sound like, the more I could relax, slow things down, and read clearly. Suddenly my readings became better.

The less character I put into it, the more my voice emerged into the piece. And when I could hear my voice in the words, the poems became more meaningful.

That struck me. And it's a simple idea.

What I got out of it, was not the words as written, but the meaning I put in as a reader. Without a reader. All writing is dead. Without a reader, the writer is sending thoughts to a great abyss of meaninglessness. A writer is only half an equation - if even that. 

It is Readers who birth these still thoughts to life. 

Sometimes even incomplete thoughts become lush and full. 

I thought, out of all my favorite books how many details were missing that I filled in as a reader. How much of the scenery, costumes, emotion did I put in. I mean there are some writers who are heavily detailed, but even they can't put in every color, every sound, every smell, every taste, every thought and breath. And why would they want to?

This isn't an excuse to be lazy as a writer. It's a fundamental understanding that everything written, every word, is in service to this great mysterious reader and their benevolent imagination.

Writing then becomes about the quality of the details and skill. Not just the abundance of technique. Any written world will always be incomplete, but the right details in the right place will feed the imagination of the reader. 

Give just enough to orientate a reader into your world, but not too much where the piece becomes a dictation of a photograph.

Read a piece, see what details stick out and why that works? Imagine what details you would give instead. Or best, try to write a poem with as few details as possible and see what emerges.

every one

in every room tonight

over books and screens over

thin scraps of paper waiting lonely

for release dying to see a person

in the piece but they ain't

in the thing

collecting fragments

we're only buying dreams of dreams

whose words dried-dead

they

belong

to you now

say it now. say

and I'll echo you

but I ain't in

the thing

every one 

in it together

in every room tonight

looking lonely for answers

in cracked-mirrors

but it ain't in 

                           the thing 

much love

-rene

ps. as always like, share, subscribe and if you want to talk you can reach me on this blog, youtube, facebook and twitter. Also my new website ReneTheWriter.

pps. Let me know if you liked this and I can do more.

Learning To Read pt 2 - Improving Your Writing

Poetry, like all writing, is the message. Every poem has one. From the author to the reader. From reader to listener. And often that message is simple, though sometimes it is obscured in difficult layers of representation. *(from part 1)

Part 2

The Message is Lost

I'm not one to tell people what is or isn't poetry. I think that is a pointless conversation. I'm also hesitant to say things are right or wrong, or good or bad. I tend to think of poems as being in-progress or finished.

It's also worth a note that Whitman's Leaves of Grass was in-progress from 1855-1892 as a published work. So it's OK to improve and change. Things don't have to be so final. 

Another note: my observations aren't meant as a law, but more of a guide for something that I see all the time with poetry, 
especially on Instagram.

I read a lot of poems on my feed. Some really move me, some make me laugh. A lot fall into this beautifully-confusing category. So many poems have great stories and ideas, but collapse in on themselves. 

They start about subject A then move to B then so on and so on until we are at F and  never have come back to any of the earlier points. Then its over.

It becomes hard to keep them all straight, but the lines feel good and there is something of a story there. Something the author wanted to say. I can read the author's excitement. Their passion. They're right on the cusp of having a polished idea in their poem, but somewhere between the feeling and the page, the message was lost. 

The poem doesn't hold the burn. 

And when I'm done reading the piece, I don't feel like I understood anything clearly. Maybe I could chalk it up to poetry being abstract or vague... poetry can be. But there is a big difference between an abstract concept, and the complete lack of one. 

This is something we develop as readers.

As a reader it is easy to make a judgement and say I liked that, this made sense, this was weird, or good, or sexy, or terrible... but as Writers, I see that judgement disappear.

I think because it is easy to understand ourselves, and it is hard to know how others will read our words. But we need that readers mind in order to write our messages clearer.

So lets start again small.

Instead of worrying about a big idea. Start with a simple one. Some people say start with a title, but I have trouble with that honestly. I think the point is to start with a concept. Something that you can return to. Something that can ground a poem into a setting, or character, or action. This is where my Zen style thinking takes over for me. Good or bad. 

Recently I wrote a poem called Coffee. 

coffee 

the taste was bitter - she looked at me as if to say 

t'know more things are different

t'know more things have changed

t'know of the many things we lost 

like the slow drip

in the cold morning

unaccounted, unrecorded, unappreciated

unable to recall just one

the taste was bitter -

and she didn't have to say

Whether or not you think it is great, I don't care, but it demonstrates one of my favorite things about writing poetry. Evolving a simple idea into an emotion, and then into an experience. 

I wrote it with the idea of coffee in the morning. Home brewed. It was a simple setting. Once I arrived on the line, the taste was bitter. I felt I had an emotional hook. The flavor for the coffee became the symbol for the relationship between the narrator and this second person.

It was tempting for me to want to evolve that idea more. To let it run away, but I try to control myself to some degree. To talk about the relationship. Why it has become bitter. Where it started. What could happen next, but there has to be a point to what is being said, or else the message will be lost. 

This is the part I think is subjective 
and where real writing craftsmanship takes over.

To me it was enough to know that the bitterness had overwhelmed the relationship. To know that the characters were not on talking terms, notice the lack of dialogue, combined with the repeating lines - she didn't have to say. It was enough of a story to focus on the drink. The slow, drip of the machine, the cold, wordless interaction fusing with the taste of bad coffee. The story became self-contained but not dull; there was a story between the lines.

And I built that taste for enough/not enough through reading. Relating my poem to all the things I liked as a reader. That is my barometer. Not what you think. Not what magazines think. Not what teachers or lovers or friends think. But my taste from reading.

For example, I am a big fan of returning to the opening line to close off a poem. It's a simple technique, not to be over-done, but it can help close off the loop of a narrative; reinforce the main concept of the bitter taste, and the establish the importance of the relationship to the reader. That is, after all, the one thing I want a reader to take away from this piece.

If I had ended with the line, unable to recall just one, the last image of the poem would be the slow drip of the machine. Which is cool and poetic in its own way, but betrays the conceit of the poem. 

Coffee is not about the machine or even the coffee being made. It is about the people drinking it, and their inability to connect during a very communal activity.

Having a cup of coffee and talking about the day is a near Universal staple of the human experience. We could simplify it even more to say, talking over a drink be it alcohol, tea, water, soda, or coffee is so human it is easy to forget that it is a thing we choose to do in order to help us connect with each other.

The utter failure in this relationship to move in to normal conversation means they are so infused with the bitterness, that there is nothing left. Nothing to talk about. Nothing to exchange but the bitter looks. 

And they both know.

So maybe you didn't get all that from my poem the first time. Maybe you think it is not a poem, cause it doesn't rhyme or have an identifiable structure that can easily be categorized as a poem. Or maybe you think it sucks. Honestly I don't care.

The words I wrote have a deliberate message I am creating through 

Imagery
Word Choice
Structure
Repetition
Composition
Social Constructs


and even though I have used a lot of poetic tools, those individual terms would mean nothing if the poem meant nothing. 

If it didn't add up to the communication experience between writing and the reader. If it didn't have a story behind the poem.

So think about this: What do you want the reader to understand and take away from your poem? What is the essential idea? Make it small. Make it focused. And see if that makes a difference in your writing.

Third Note: This completely applies to most types of writing in general. Either Song. Novel. Essay. There should be some clear idea in any writing that needs to be said. With out that essence, why should anyone read it?

Much love

-rene

ps. as always like, share, subscribe and if you want to talk you can reach me on this blog, youtube, facebook and twitter. Also my new website ReneTheWriter.

pps. Let me know if you liked this and I can do more.

Learning To Read. Pt 1

You probably know by now that I love to read poetry. It's the reason I got into writing in the first place. 


And in the short time I've been reading publicly, I've been lucky enough to find so much encouragement (btw thank you for all the kind words. they mean a lot to me). It's become such a big part of my life, that I decided to talk about how I learned to read and hopefully get more people to try.

Quiet a few years ago, a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company visited my school and read On The Eve of St. Agnes.To tell you that it was an important moment for me would be an understatement. It changed how I wrote, how I read, how I understood poetry. 

And while I am nowhere near on that level, I am better for what I learned from that experience. More about that specific reading later but here are some things that have stuck with me since then.

⸓

Part 1

Poetry People and Poetry Is The Message

Let's start with an uninspired, blanket observation: poetry isn't for everyone. And while that's true for almost anything, I have found such a hot or cold reaction to Poetry that I can't help but try and theorize why something I love so much, can be so hated as well. So I'll move to my second cliche and move to the beginning of these experiences.

Most of the time, when people find out that I love poems, I'm met on some scale between confusion, annoyance, distaste, or anger.

Rarely.

                 Vary rarely.

I meet someone who enjoys poetry too. 

It's not impossible. But I find those encounters to be outliers. And of those few encounters it's even harder to find someone who enjoys the same kind of poetry I do. Maybe this is do to my geography, or the small circles I keep, and maybe this would all be solved if I just got out more?... but this has been my experience.

So younger me, often kept poetry as a solitary subject. Something not to bring in to conversations with my friends. The times I remember best, ditching class, to have time alone in a corner of a library, or in my room, or on the university lawn, or hiding in the front seat of my car with the windows down. Quietly absorbing every line. Taking in the page as a secret passed thru history just for me. And I was fine with that. In fact it was exactly what I wanted. A way to enjoy my lonerism.

After all, poetry wasn't about making friends. 

Still isn't. 

Poetry is something I do for me. I read and write cause I want to. It's my desire that is it's own reward. There's no monetary value. No good job or high five. No reason other than a desire to read and write. I can share a moment with a writer's thoughts, see if they speak to me, if I like it or not or if I want even want that message in my life. And everything about Poetry, hinges on me. And while yes, sometimes it's another author who wrote the piece, the conversation is strictly internal. They were merely the fuel for my own imagination. I hold the conversation. I dictate how it ends. 

And I imagine this true for you, if you are a poetry person.

Maybe that's where the disconnect occurs? Maybe some people don't understand why they should put so much work or thought into a poem when it takes so much effort to understand and they receive no tangible reward. Poetry is slow. Its practice requires calming that internal itch for fast and easy and waiting for a longer, personal reward that may not reveal its purpose until years down, when a reader can recall a succinct and poignant line.

And while poetry is personal, at its origin, it's meant to be communal. Meant to be spread and shared. That was a big lesson for me to learn from the Shakespearean Actor and my wonderful Romance Professor. What's the point of writing, of publishing, if not to spread out like a virus thru time, infecting futures with the strange ramblings of your mind? 

Poetry, like all writing, is the message. Every poem has one. From the author to the reader. From reader to listener. And often that message is simple, though sometimes it is obscured in difficult layers of representation. *(More on this later)

That communication is the most important part of reading. Even if you're alone in your room, on a recording, in bed with a lover, or on a stage in front of a room full of people, or live on Instagram, the point is to uncover the message. 

Bring it out. 

Give it warmth. 

Slowly make it live. 

Only the reader can do that.

A good reading should help the message emerge. A great reading should bring the author's voice off the page and into our reality. Into the moment.

Sometimes it takes a lot of time and re-readings to ever get to a comfortable place and say - I know this poem well enough to read it.

I hear a lot of people read unconfidently. And this is probably because they aren't precisely sure what they are saying. 

So take time. 

I never read aloud the first time. And I never perform without many, many re-readings. I imagine this was equally true for the Shakespearean Actor who read at my University.

Read unfiltered, then Re-Read asking lots of questions like:

What did the author mean? What is actually being said here? What should the reader get from this? Why is the poem divided up the way it is? Are the rhymes and rhythms supposed to be emphasized or is it just a background mood? What is the tone of this poem? Etc.

There are a million questions and even more answers, but with every answer you find (different readers will and should find different answers) you should get closer to understanding your message.


 This is the work of reading. It's not easy. 

And the reward... that's even harder to define. 

Maybe here we can revisit this Love/Hate problem. 

Why work so hard for words? Why go slowly over an idea, again and again? Why obsess over someone else's thoughts? If you see no value in it, it is the equivalent of eating a chunk of rubber tire. Hard. Distasteful. Unrewarding. It's easy to understand why someone would hate the thought of it. Or think it strange that other people enjoy it.

I think that's the inherited attitude of our High School understanding of Poetry. And for that, I won't blame them.

But if like me, you are a Poetry Person, you know there are universes of ideas to escape to. Dreams to make. Experiences to feel. Each one has made my life so much deeper. Has taught me to appreciate others. To Think. To Feel. To Love. To be cautious of the words I use. To be mindful of my form. To be something more than I could be without Poetry. 

Human. 

So I challenge you to find a poem, record yourself reading it the first time, then read it over until you find some new insight into the meaning, and record it again. Hear the change that comes with understanding.

Much love

-rene

ps. as always like, share, subscribe and if you want to talk you can reach me on this blog, youtube, facebook and twitter. Also my new website ReneTheWriter.

pps. Let me know if you liked this and I can do more.

Importance?

As some of you may know I do a lot of different kinds of writing

songwriting

fiction

blogs

poetry

And my poetry I just started to share on my Instagram. And I've gotten a great response. So I wanted to give a general thank you to everyone who has been awesome and joined me in this.

Poetry is something I've always kept close to my chest. Mostly because I have had so many negative or mildly negative response to sharing it in the past. But that's a story for another post, or to be self-referential that's a memory that will remain in the dark until later...

But the other day I was prepping a poem for Instagram. When I went through several really intense emotions while I was writing it.

I'm not sure why this poem is/was so different for me, but I found myself thinking this is something important. Not important in a Deceleration of Independence historical way. Or in a Origin of Species scientific discovery kind of way either, just in a personal journey moment.

I felt like I had summed up a big idea. And it was a complete giving. A full statement of itself.

Normally if I write a love song. It is not the end all statement of Love that I have. It is not a closed line. A definitive stamp on the subject. But this poem felt like a full expressed idea. 

Maybe I'll feel differently tomorrow and come back to the subject with new eyes?... I mean of course I will... it must be something intrinsically human to retread ideas and to find new facets... see I even did it just now.

So I guess it is not stop the presses type of news. But it is a poem that, for now I feel proud of. I will post it in parts over the next few days... maybe but for now here it is in it's entirety. 

-rene

mood:

why do you care for flowers?

I was in an ivy-autumn cafe
when she read me and asked
-- "Why do you care so for Spring? And for flowers?"

A Fragile Thing. Of Porcelain. I wrote
But she rolled over me asking
-- "Why can't you write of blood?
Of the black and blue bruises of Children?
Of the dark red streets soaked in heartache?
Have you seen all the shades of appropriation?
Do you know the colors of isolation?
Like glass hung over us?
That colors us?
And our visions of
ghosts like walking
dreams from lives lost?
But flowers," she said,
"Why do you care so for flowers?"


Gone. A Fast.
For Five days my words gone.
Away from my Paris-were-Texas-Fever-Dreams.
Away from hills. And meadows. And God-Damn Flowers.
She had asked, "Writer -- what good is a word if it doesn't speak for children? How honest can you be when you've never known an honest thing like hunger?"

Week 2 The Wheel Of Perpetual Turning

Yesterday. 

The morning was colder than I expected. Not enough blankets. The air was crisp like winter and my back and shoulder were wrapped up to each other for warmth. 

I checked my phone.

My alarm hadn't rung yet. 15 minutes early.

"I could still be sleeping... ugh." 

I rolled up a blanket to my shoulder, but it was too late. I was awake. 

Mirror.

Too early for you.

Mirror.

Too early for myself.

My eyes don't keep open long enough to really look anyway. 

I washed myself in the cold sink waiting for the heat to come, but what can I do... it's a slow morning.

Somehow I had routine-d my way to therapy across town. 

Hygiene. Clothing. Traffic. Parking.

There was a pretty young woman doing squats at the wall. There was a fifty something man, with his butt in the air working out his spine on a massage table, there was a young golfer in his twenties working out his wrist, and me at the wheel of perpetual turning. 

And we all had the same face of morning grimace. 

Mirror-less. 

There is little interaction between the patience here. Every now and then a quiet conversation. A polite excuse me as someone sneaks past another. But not much more than that. 

Turning my wheel. 

Listening to the grind of metal wondering, 'Am I allowed to have headphones?' They have Top 40 playing on a little computer in the corner so it's not dead silence. 'But if I'm gonna be here for an hour plus... it would be nice to disappear into headphones. While I turn.'

Turning. This wheel.

Things are starting to loosen up. My body isn't locked into itself anymore. And I'm actually feeling better.

And I start to wonder what a strange creature we are. Who are we that can sit in rooms and turn wheels and improve our state of living?

No other animal could be so silly as to think of this. But no other creature can heal like this.

5 mins forward. 5 mins back. Don't worry about lunch till I'm out the door. And headphones. 

No other being on this planet is crazy enough to have these thoughts while they are in pain.

Turning this wheel. 

And now writing.

This wheel.

Moving.

On.

-rene

ps. as always like, share, subscribe and if you want to talk you can reach me on this blog, youtube, facebook and twitter.


mood:

Therapy Week 1

'Try.'

It's what I've been telling myself. Sitting in a chair in the middle of a therapy center with five other patients beside me. Varying ages. Varying problems. This one has a hurt back. That one is working on her legs. Standing against the wall stretching is a women with a shoulder injury and her husband, sits by her side, watching the other patients as he waits.

The two therapists are at a computer station, typing out something. Maybe paperwork. Before they make another round to check on our progress. 

Breath.

Count.

Try.

Stretching my neck left. Hold five seconds. Stretch it right. I can feel something in my shoulder clicking and the sound radiates through my neck and into my ear. And it is horrible and loud. The pain is quick like getting a shot, and leaves as soon as I bring my head back to center, but the sound stays with me.

Breath.

Count.

Try.

I give it a moment. Before I do another set of 15. The old lady and her husband move to a machine that is kind of like a stationary bike except you pedal with your hands. Churning the handles in circles. Moving out the shoulders. It makes a whirring noise as she goes. The sound of resistance inside the machine. Turning. Turning. Fighting. Turning.

The husband is quiet. His lips shut tight. And his eyes dart back and forth across the room behind his glasses. She laughs, "It's hard to go backwards."

And he snaps awake for a moment, and whispers to her. Reaching his hand out to her. She laughs again. "No Daniel," she laughs to him and takes a moment to breath with her eyes closed.

"Keep at it," he whispers.

Her eyes shut tighter, "I can't. I can't." Her voice is quick and snappy. 

He whispers again but I couldn't hear it.

She takes a breath, and puts her hands back on the machine. And lets out three quick, Agh's.

I move my head left. Then right. Waiting for that cracking noise to pull through my shoulder. 

Breath.

Count.

Try.

'Lucky,' I thought, 'It could be worse.' And start moving out my shoulders in circles. 15 forward. 15 back. 3 times. 'It could be permanent...'

My therapist comes by to check me out. How am I doing? How does it feel?

"The same." I answered. 

And he nods. 

'Is it supposed to feel different? There is no way I could feel better this soon?'

He explains that the grinding, clicking noise is the sound of the muscles loosening up. That my body was in defense mode. And it is calming down. Eventually it will relax again and go back.

And that is comforting... for a bit. Till that crack rips across me again. That sharp pain. That ringing sound. A reminder. This happened. I'll try to heal it. But I can't reverse it. This happened.

The old lady begins at her machine again. And her husband closes his eyes.

Breath.

Count.

Try.

'It is hard to backwards.'



-rene

ps. as always like, share, subscribe and if you want to talk you can reach me on this blog, youtube, facebook and twitter


mood:

les noces de pierrette pablo picasso

One Day At A Time.

I don't have a lot of words today...

Just got out of an appointment to meet my physical therapist. To catch you up, I had an injury during SXSW last week. Shoulder and left hand feel busted. And the impact is radiating down through my back and legs. I don't know how much I feel like talking about it yet. Something's take time to digest. I'm not the kind of guy to just react quickly.

I think I'll be digesting this for a while.

My body takes time to heal.

My mind takes time to absorb.

My words are slow to form. 

I'm also a little bit tired of explaining what happened. It's one of those things that people don't understand the terminology and so they can't understand what I'm going through. Or it least it feels that way. 

I say I was hit by a lighting rig, and they look at me like what is that. So I describe it to them. 

More questions. 

More details. 

Then they ask me about being in a band. Am I famous. Etc. 

I feel like I'm talking more than I need to. And all I think about is this constant pain. 

Morning. Day. Night.

This pain is with me. 

Morning. Day. Night.

I'm reminded.

Morning. Day. Night.

I have realized one thing. I'm still getting used to asking for help. I don't know what I'd be doing if it wasn't for Rachel. Convincing me I need help. I've always done things on my own. And after all the years of her helping, I thought I'd be better at accepting it, but like I said I'm slow to accept. Slow to absorb. Slow at understanding.

I have some shows planned in the near future that are now in question. I'll be doing my videos. This blog. Poetry. Do my therapy. One day at a time. Breathing helps. And heat.


All that and listening to Wilco.

One day at a time.

-rene

ps. as always like, share, subscribe and if you want to talk you can reach me on this blog, youtube, facebook and twitter

Refresher, Things To Be Done...

Last weekend was the best weekend. When I actually took some time for myself, put down the work for a little bit, still did some but hey, my life is always a changing process, hung out with my wife and son, and got to recharge. 

I think I had been too involved in working, but that just means I need to recenter. Every day was turning out to be exactly like the day before, and I needed to make a conscious effort to be awake. To be aware. It is never ending. Maybe I need to get back to a regular meditative practice....

Anyway The Weekend Playlist has been a blast, the studio is going so smoothly, 2 new songs mixed, and my poetry has been doing really well on Instagram. So happy that my words are being read! Can't tell you how long I've wanted to share things and I love all the positivity. Big thanks to Whosthatgirl2013 and Poetry4real for the kindness.

I'll be gearing up for SXSW. Practice. Practice. Weekend Playlist. Practice. 

Putting some Idyll Green shows on the touring book, that's right I'm talking shows soon...

Launching our podcast Why Didn't I Write That? in the next few weeks.

And for sure, I'll try to spend another evening with my boy watching the bats fly out from the lake. Happiest moment in a long time. 

Also try to write a new poem? I don't know

-rene

check out a little bit of what my music is here too:

ps. as always like, share, subscribe and if you want to talk you can reach me on this blog, youtube, facebook and twitter