to the great glorious beautiful and soul-saving matriarchs of my life
who fostered the sensitivities amongst a whole world of hardenings
~
for all the treasurehunters, who use former centuries' ways to deal with this one
foreword
Everybody's story starts the same. We are all womb dwellers. We are all violently pushed into this world by our mother's love. We all catch our first breath and let it all out, crying. We cry for mercy or relief in any form, and what comes next is our first taste of comfort. We all spend the rest of our lives craving comfort.
Comfort comes in many forms and for me, in the most exaggerated art form, words. Words are a thrill seek because they cannot be trusted. Words are dangerous because they expire. Words will never live up to their promises and yet, their movement in the shadows leaves everyone entranced and nobody safe from their seductive siren songs.
Words are strung together in tales by humans who are brave enough to explore the landscape of their inner world, a feeble attempt to reveal a trodden path to their fellow travelers. Words are a map to nowhere and everywhere all at once, a key to a locket around a heart that you know beats in rhythm and waiting but only death will open the door to the chest holding its secrets.
Words come to us in so many forms. Musings, poetry, scripture, confessions, anger spun in fiery webs of confusion and lies, love letters, songs, postcards, snail mail, words of affirmation, words that bend and bleed under knotted fists full of lead, words that work their way to the core of our being like a worm drunk on its first rotten apple of the fall.
Words have the power to wake us up or put us to sleep. I am the fortunate daughter of a man who believed in the power of bedtime stories. I fell asleep almost every night to his familiar voice and gentle hands turning the pages of a book that was simultaneously turning the pages of my heart. He was the comfort that I craved through my whole childhood.
Words are a life saving raft that drift me towards the ones who pay their attention and nearly drown themselves in sacrifice to find the deepest cavern within. We collide in the light and I reach for the writers. I pull them to the surface of themselves, I pull them close and let them climb on in and rest. I devour their life's work and just as they repose, they restore me in the glory of appreciation, the joy of being found, and the comfort of being known. Writers need readers. Readers need writers. We all need a witness.
I don't remember the exact day that Daniel planted himself inside of my world with all of his words and whimsy, but I do remember the fear surrounding the day he told me he was moving far away. Words were of no comfort then; they only served to salt the wounds, and augment the echo of Frost shouting throughout my life, "Nothing gold can stay."
Daniel packed my attic with assurances of his return, he strung silver around my neck and swore it would never tarnish, he surrounded me with a hedge of friendships in common, reasons to return, and still I carried on in my unbelief. I built my walls, I dug my moats, I spat my silence in the direction of every falling star.
And then,
Time, like a lazy river, founds its way back towards the sea.
The sea where we first met, that sandbar in the middle of nowhere, the magical place where words bridge hearts and lives and awaken us to the very real truth that we exist in this space and time together and we matter.
Daniel is a wordsmith, a song-writer, a poet, a master craftsman, a whittler of hearts and many moons ago, he made me a believer in everlasting philia love.
-Tara Endicott
Media, Pennsylvania
5-29-2017
introduction
this collection finds me on the back end of a truly expansive journey, and as i place my metaphorical seal on the way that it all sits together, the best notion i can think of to describe the way it feels is gratitude. but that feeling is rooted in so many things. there's the teacher who actually motivated a group of teenage boys at an all-boys jock-ruled high school to get excited enough about the art of poetry that they would meet after hours to talk about it. there are the people through the years who saw things in my language and encouraged me to dig my heels into chasing down the writing muses more. there are the people who took me to the depths of my heart in this lifetime and gave me something to even write about. there are my heroes who were able to give me that shuddery feeling inside my stomach by their storying so that i had to put their book down and collect myself a minute. there's everyone who looks you in the eye and makes you know your own story is important in a world that constantly counter-struggles for the platform to speak and not listen.
i have this memory from when i was around 10 or 11, and there was this close family friend who was involved at the school i attended, and thus observed me on a regular basis. she was consoling me after pulling me aside when i'd been mistreated by some thoughtless classmate, and i remember her staring me squarely in the eyes and saying, "i'm telling you this for your own good: you are going to have to build yourself a thicker skin or else this world is gonna eat you up and spit you out, boy." i remember wanting to bear down and acquire what she was talking about. and yet there is something that is true that you will find in people who write dialogue, people who counsel, people who pen songs, people who make comforting spouses, people who whisper their way into animals' trust and move passersby with their paintings. having one's vulnerability at hand to look squarely at the natural human elements of emotion, the pain that is so often balanced against a wonder and a sensitivity... this is something to be kept. and i believe that the act of writing is a way of making a record of the visceral, a tangible, living momento which can be released. let go. it is an agoletting without compare.
it is interesting to me how we use the term 'dreaming' to signify both what we do at night when the brain is restoring and repairing itself, making sense of all the loopholes and inconsistencies of daily living... and as well, as a notion of a daytime putting forth of our hearts and imaginations into territories which will better us. because the latter in truth does the same as the former. i believe that all the instances wherein we try to pause and encapsulate what has bigger meaning to us, be it writing a letter to someone, leaving a random note behind, scribbling down one's journaled thoughts, or composing a symphony, it is no matter; it is ultimately an act which serves our betterment in ways we very rarely understand.
in march of '16, i decided to embark on a grand poem-a-day project which would begin on my birthday. the bulk of what you are holding is comprised of writings from that year. the regimented endeavor of attempting to put down whatever meaningful forms decided to meander from my subconscious that day was a study of sorts. i wanted to explore for myself what gave language power, what types of reasons made passages of written word into passages of life, able to transmute a type of inner experience and make it feelable to another sentient being in a more universal way. and from being a person who has spent years thinking about such things from inside the structures of songwriting, it was an entirely different challenge. a song relies on so many other factors to give feeling. a song wants to become insidious, refraining from forgettal by refraining in repeat form. but a poem must create its vignette out of the quiet, strain its emotion out of its own purity. there is nothing to fall back on. some days i failed more than succeeded. but i can only hope the learning curve materialized in there somewhere. supposedly miles davis once said, "when you hit a wrong note, it's the next note that you play that determines if it's good or bad." not only is this true in the sense of what flows from how we directly treat our own mistakes in life, but also in the sense that our art refracts the grace with which we accept our (mis)fortunes.
the truth of it all is that i could not have chosen a better year to endeavor into all of this. not only was this a year which entailed an extreme healing time over different senses of heartbreak and grief, but it was one wherein i spent some of the most light-filled days i've ever known, entreated to loving and being loved in a way which permeated my world. not only was it a year wherein i experienced seismic shifts