ROME, NEW YORK
Wrote a song about a memory that returned while revisiting this small town upstate, a seemingly dark hollowed out place where loneliness and despair formed a miasma that just clung to the sky in desperation, grieving so many genocidal seasons gone by.
Your military family's disposition instantly changed upon arrival; from the vibrant topless joys of Greek island life on a bright blue Mediterranean sea teeming with creatures (before climate change bleached all the coral reefs) to the all-american exploitation of sad people stuck in the working class abyss. Grim.
Rome was so brown. Brown flannel, brown car, brown house, brown beer, brown firewood chopped with a brown axe laboriously piled brown roof high, brown gerbils running around in their brown cage eating their brown babies head first, their tiny brown lives going down mommy's devouring brown mouth. Brown drowned everything resembling bliss out.
Except for the old piano you found abandoned in the garage. It was the one bright spot in your young life during that time. Yes, the piano was also brown.
So, to cope, as children do, you turned inward since attack dad was back. He snuck in under the covers where you were unsoundly asleep, way too old by now to still be sucking your thumb. He would unapologetically slip past your little body parts with his numbly damaging drunken hands. There were never any panties to protect you because your mom wouldn't let you put them on before bed. "That's dirty," she said.
Several soul parts fractured off and got flung about higgledy-piggledy all over that two story corner lot on Wrightsettlement Road from 1980-81. And there they stayed until you returned on this day in 2015 to breathe them all back into your rapidly growing spiritual playground, the expanding universe of newly recovered Yous.
Standing near the western bank of the river, opposite the spot where you used to always play as a child, you were performing a releasing ritual, ankle deep in the gently flowing Mohawk, when a a flashing light glanced by the side of your eyes.
Suddenly you realized that you were now standing in the exact same spot where the 10 year old you would always see faint flashes of a comforting ghost lady wading, compassionately whispering & witnessing...you...me...us
I was in this place now to close the circle.
I must be here to complete the time loop.
I am one of my own spirit guides, separated only by the illusion of time. And quantum-level elegies of retrieval and redemption cried me a river of relief.
HERE is the song that this reunion of retrieved soul parts wrote during that hallowed gathering:
"Walking home from school
where punishment is play
writing the same sentence
100 times is great
cuz then we don't have to
go outside with the others
who laugh at our lack of logos
then scar us with names.
Slipping up the icy grade
past Pennystreet Lane
over the Mohawk bridge
snow covered in decay
where the ghost lady gently whispers
"it's gonna be alright one day"
Laying in wait
the beast constantly betrayed
whose hot fist warms our pillows
Cold is the wind in the willows
Mr. Toad haunts all our small
darkened days
Until something spills
and we wake to thrill and
see our mother at last
risen from her grave
taking my brother and me
away from this chambered place
thrown frozen into a trunk of hope
We beamed like cherubic Grigori
Protection is heaven
She loves us
she really does
really
But less than a mile goes by
before she pulls into a parking lot
and begins to cry
I spy with my little eye
2 tiny broken twigs
in the early morning mist
And as she turns back around
we know we'll be the ones
to pay for this
So we leave something behind
on the corner of Black River Blvd
and North 46"
