The intersection of memory and imagination.... a cold, blue metallic dust falls from the skies... this world merely dead rock without a song... baby's first cry, the old crone's last breath... the trees that whisper their dark secrets when everyone's sleeping...

Thirty years ago, that Mexican an restaurant on Barrachs Street in the Quarter, Cathy turned to me and said "I've got to start creating, there's only so many stars in the sky." At the time, all was psychology, self-expression, and artificial religious substances for me...the idea of distant influence and trans human opportunity was anathema, like a tambourine to a Lutheran...but then the fever dreams took me, smashed all the parts you can't see, and directed me to reassemble myself...and then I saw the face in the tree outside a Waldo Drive window...was it smiling? Not exactly...

The intersection of the figural and the liberal... a borderland between the two, both and neither...even if you write about an actual event that transpired in the real world, using the must concrete terms imaginable, the choice of terms, their rhythm, inflection every nuance - all cry "Figure!" Figure reframes the frame... for the purpose of police courts and cremation ground, the illusion of identity like the illusion of property...who owns America? the gas pumps or the wind? the song erupting from work's labor to ease the heart, to give courage, work become play... the tribes pass around a song tribe to tribe, singer to singer, like a wax body that's being animated, dressed, camouflaged, displayed...it's everybody's baby, it's nobody's baby...there's only one blues song, it has a thousand faces, a thousand verses, and it's always and ever being written for the first time whenever the singer begins his cry...

The border between fate and freedom...

The intersection of Carrollton and Claiborne...welcome home to the end of the world...Sunday evenings when sadness gripped the air like an antique hand of death...song's necessary as breath to rescue the soul from its expiring body, to restore its essential obscurity in the womb of black, mothering night...your life as a fabulous, dusty B-side,a beautiful blue and white label, the tiny silver letters...you wink and say "give me a spin!"

The sensuous details of your life...the loathing of bananas...the sound of "coup d'état" on the tongue...the humid darkness of the blue bedroom, rain smell of dog...the feel of the dying saint's cold hand, the white gurney in the infirmary... the sound the heart makes breaking into life...

The intersection of dream and fact...the fact of dreaming that uncanny dream, you wake up shivering feeling so real the scare of the monster or the caress of strange lips...who is the you your dream tonight imagines you to be? The song is a dream that takes the listener, the dancer, over..."I can't get that damn thing out of my head!" viral sonic invasion...like lure, the disease is the cure...fire with fire, the new song chases the old out the head...

Backstage at the Cabooze in 1988, Diana asked me "where do the songs come from?" no answer can I find... I point to the stones, and the dust...maybe there was once a great wall here, the busy travelers have abandoned this place...but, look, the birds still fly overhead, and listen to the lone white bird overhead just beginning to break into her song...