When he is thirteen, before he can even be rightfully called a man, he falls asleep and wakes up in deep in a forest, the sort of forest drenched in a thick haze, where light filters down to lush undergrowth and disappears. He will later discover, when he is in British Columbia, that this is a rainforest, but he doesn’t know this yet. He is lost, he knows that, but unafraid.

He sees her at the edge of his vision, just a glance. She is beautiful, the sort of beauty composed of opposites so well put together you don’t realise they’re opposites until much later, the dark and light superposed wonderfully, magically. Perfectly assembled for this dream-scape.

She is moving away from him, and in the peculiar logic of dreams, it seems to him worse to lose her that to become more lost in a place he has never before been.

Moving through the undergrowth, she almost out-paces him at every turn, but still he follows, deeper and deeper into the growing gloom.

Then finally he breaks through into a sort of clearing and she is staring directly at him. It seems for a moment all he can see is her almond eyes, deep brown, liquid, radiant.

He wakes up to his own bed, his own room. Every detail of the dream fresh in his mind, he vows never to forget. The years roll by, he becomes older and more prone to believe he’s wise, but he re-vows time and time again that he will never forget. And he never does.

He grows older but he still looks for her face in crowds. He spends ten years looking and convincing himself that this girl or that girl has inside themselves something that makes them like her. He is wrong, and he is wrong, and he is wrong again.

Then he sees her.

There is a moment when his heart simply refuses to beat, when all the blood in his body seems to have rushed to his head and stayed there, when the world spins down on its axis and time stops and all there is in the world is her.

But she is, of course, on the periphery of his existence, and when he manages to strike up a conversation she slips away. Over the ensuing months, she keeps moving away from him, an in the peculiar upside-down logic of real life, he decides to let her go.

She disappears and he settles for a simulacrum.

His life becomes a dream he can’t wake up from. He folds himself into the masses and tries to forget her, and sometimes he is successful. Sometimes fails desperately. He keeps himself too busy to think and finds his mind takes over and he is again elsewhere in dreams.

He awakes in the rainforest night after night. It is empty of life, empty as the distant reaches of space, oppressively silent. He calls her name out, for he has found it out, silence broken and flung into the air like a flock of birds. Nothing. He wakes up. Nothing.

In the years proceeding he finds someone. He falls in love or something like love or something she will come to call not love at all, though that will be after the fact. He settles on her. He settles for her. She leaves him, leaves him, leaves him, leaves him fraught with the ever-present dread that she will leave him. Finally, he leaves her, like a coward he leaves her, or she leaves him and it is all over and there is nothing but ashes and fall-out remaining.

Deep in the ashes of it all he dreams, he remembers another her, deep in a forest. He remembers finding her. He realises everything is not lost.

When he is twenty-five, before he can rightfully be called a man, he wakes up and understands that it matters, and that it always has mattered. He can’t convince himself otherwise, though he has tried.

It is as if he has emerged from the ocean and can see as he was meant to. She has always been there, even when she was not there.

One day, she touches his arm ever so slightly, so shyly, so impossibly, and he somehow knows what she is and will be. He gathers her into his arms and looks down and it seems for a moment all he can see is her almond eyes, deep brown, liquid, radiant. There is in him a flash of untamed fear that he will wake up. But he never does.

One of the first songs I consciously remember writing and wanting to save. Circa maybe seven years ago. Also perhaps the most ridiculously self-indulgent I’ve ever written.

Who pushed splinter in my side?
I reach and feel the water and the blood.
Is this love, to let me go?

Who pushed these thorns into my head?
These barbs are oh so bloody and so red.
Was it love, to let me go?

Oh I know just the words to say.
The words to tear us all apart.
Oh I know just know to break
a girl’s heart.

You touch your finger to my side.
Horrified to feel the wound so wet.
Is this love, to let me go?

You tremble, hammer in your hands.
You know exactly how this story ends:
Was this love, to let me go?

Oh I know just the words to say.
The words to tear despair apart.
But I know just how to break
a girl’s heart.

Pray that I won’t break yours.
I’m scared to speak and then regret.
Pray that I won’t break yours.
I’ll bite my tongue. There’s still hope left.
Pray that I won’t break yours.
How far can we get? How far can we get?

Oh you knew just the words to say.
The words to tear my soul apart.
Oh you knew just to break
my heart.

Super-old song. Just getting the lyrics online.

Does it surprise you,
what’s going on in the places
where you haven’t looked in so long?
Do you wonder if you know how
to pick up the pieces again.

You pick them up. You pick them up.
You pick them up but they fall down again.

It was written that
it would be written:

An improbable prophecy offered,
a lithic blossom snatched
from the periodic fist:

Then without words you wander
the bright heart of an eloquent world:
Then without rancour you wither
beneath a thousand tongues of flame.

• Romaine lettuce with a balsamic vinegar + olive oil + honey + goat’s cheese = awesome dressing
• Boiled potatoes
• Rye bread with a balsamic vinegar and olive oil dipping sauce
• Tabbouleh (Note to self, needs finer chopped parsley, fewer pieces of onion, more lemon juice, and more fresh ground pepper, plus some tomatoes and red peppers)
• Red wine from France (but not good red wine from France, mind you

That was delicious..

He steps from the plane and the pieces of his life fall at his feet. They are broken, awkwardly and impossibly twisted, tumbling to the pavement in a place he has never before seen.

In the taxi that takes him to his apartment he imagines the rest of the world gliding by in still motion, as if everything has been arrested, as if time has stopped and all that’s left to be seen is a montage of moments left unfulfilled.

There is a man outside the building selling fruit. The man offers him an apple. He declines the apple, declines to meet the apple-seller’s eyes, climbs the steps to his new home and turns the key.

The apartment is less furnished than he had been led to believe. A chesterfield and a bed, that is all. The clothes on his back and a keyring with one key, that is all. This is the new person he has become.

He uses most of the last hours of the day and most of the little money he has to purchase a computer. He sets it down at a local cafe and begins to write about anything. Nothing comes to his fingertips. It’s the same here as it was there, only without the things he thought he loved.

She catches his eye and smiles at him. He isn’t used to this sort of brazen introduction. He sends a brief smile back at her and resumes writing nothing. There are words on his screen, but they don’t mean anything. There are sentences and phrases, but no meaning, no plot, nothing to hold them together.

He watches her leave the cafe, hears the rhythmic click of her heels hitting the side walk, sees the coffee or tea or something balanced precariously along with books and a bag. He watches as she steps into the street, watches as the car that is moving too fast to stop strikes her. He sees her hips crumple, her body twist awkwardly and impossibly. He knows she is dead.

He presses forward with the crowd of horrified onlookers. A page raggedly torn from the spine of one of her books crumples as he steps on it. It is streaked with her blood. Soon it streaked with his vomit.

As he retches, a phrase catches his eye. A sentence, a thought. And like that, he has his story.

Didn’t really like this poem very much. Trying to clean it up a bit.

Was I really ever without you? I suppose there was a time
when you were elsewhere in body, elsewhere in dreams.

I shudder now at my desperate economics in your absence;
You are my unexpected affluence, my blossoming prosperity:

You are the whispered promise of a day without night.
You are the promise of a night strewn with suns.

Were you always there at the corners of the world?
I would like to think so, that you were present

even in my poverty, even in my debasement.
I would like to think you were around a corner.

Was I really ever without you? I suppose there was a time
when I was elsewhere in body, elsewhere in dreams.

I shudder now at my meagre aspirations
Scrabbling in dust to disinter a sickening fiction.

I shudder now that you might not have offered yourself
as my shadow past and exuberant future.

That you might not have said, Sell everything for me.
I sold everything, and months later, do not miss myself.

What remains after the fire
is the undiminished stone,
the bedrock of your insanity.

Perhaps one day you will
mortar them into a cairn,
an altar to the furious gods
of your occasional holocaust.

Yet today you are sowing fuel in furrows,
in deeper and deeper wrinkles,
your nostrils brimming acrid,
your mind lost in the strati.

A cigarette tossed against the scree
blossoms like a sudden star.
Again an agonising glance at
the undiminished stone.

My sister Kristin is leaving for Burkina Faso in three weeks or so. She’s going to start a music program there and probably teach some English on the side. On Friday, she enlisted Tim Kolb (the worship leader from Freshwater), Andrew (her boyfriend), and me to fill out the singer-songwriter portion of the evening.

It was amazing. If I had to pick the best guitar players I know it would be a toss-up between Tim and Andrew. Tim sang a couple of his own songs, both of which I thought were very good, and covered a song by someone that I can’t remember because I have a bad memory. Andrew played three of his own songs, one of which is still in my head (I’m screaming, “You’re on my side!” in there right now).

Now, I can’t speak for them, but this was the first time I played in public, at least formally, and I was nervous as all get out. But I think it went well. I sang “Making it Up as You Go”, “Honour Your Wings”, “Song for Virginia Tech”, and “Waiting”. And by the end of the set I had forgotten there were 200 people watching me. And Andrew apparently got my “making it up as you go” hook stuck in his head, so my work there seems to be done.

Still, I think I want to do it again…

I’ve never had a muse. I’ve always wondered what it might be like to have one.

There’s so much to the creative process I don’t understand. Why two people’s art can look and sound so different, yet be distinctly theirs. Why when you seek to imitate it you feel like a forger and your art like a forgery, no matter how remarkable the result.

I can’t count the number of songs I’ve written and the number of poems I’ve pulled out of my head. I don’t think I’d want to. They come and go in phases and shifts. I could never count on a living as a musician: I simply can’t turn it on like a tap. I can sit at the piano and write fifty different phrases and attach fifty different lyrics to those phrase but they won’t satisfy me. Thirty minutes or two days later I sit down and the first thing I play is magic.

There are so few chords and combinations of notes, really. There are only so many ways to put them together before you run out and have to start recycling.

Sometimes you can want desperately to write about something but find yourself unable to write about it and instead spend a half hour writing about something else when you should be sleeping.

Playing old songs is a challenge. I can never remember exactly how they go. Maybe I’m making them up as I go, again, and I have no way of knowing. Only the few I record I know for certain. The rest are possibly recent.

Isn’t it strange how music can reach out and tweak something inside you that logic and facts and science can never explain, much less themselves touch? I played a song the other day that made me feel sad in a way I haven’t felt for a long time now. It made me feel something. This amazes me.

Thinking back, my former art was a shallow imitation of feeling, a tissue-thin façade less tangible than those things I professed to know and write about. If you had to hear them, I am sorry. If you felt a remarkable kinship for me then, even more so. I should be forgiven, I think, for those songs and the words to those songs. We all should, who wrote like that. We were children. If we had a grasp of irony far in excess of our years, we squandered it on songs we thought were about love. We were obsessed with love and being in love and writing about love and being in love. When you are in the desert you write songs about water. We are adults now and instead of obsessing some of us have moved on and are actually loving and being in love. That’s a much harder thing to write about. There’s almost no way to do it properly.

If I’m being too subtle in my lyrics, I don’t apologise. If you can mine seventeen different meanings or none at all, I couldn’t care less. These songs are for me, not for you. These things are the most intensely selfish things I will ever produce, the most tuned to myself. They can’t help but be. They’re my intellectual and emotional children. That you hear them, some of them, is a raw vulnerability I can’t help but shy away from. This is the singer/songwriter curse, of course. These are not songs written by a group of people in a room. They’re not statements about politics or revolution or technological disorientation. They’re songs that bubble to the surface in privacy, when alone.

I have become too verbose.