Martyr Spikes and Butter Knives

A patron asked me about books on exploring. I could smell cigarette smoke seeping from her tired jacket. She said she was on an adventure from Oregon, to which I said, “Oh, Oregon! I'd love to see it someday!” She corrected my pronunciation and as she walked away, I wondered if she would find what she was looking for.

My teacher exhausts and elevates. I begin to dismantle in the unrelenting gaze given for the Greater. There is a negotiation between silence and speech, awareness and coherence. Wordly urgencies re-situate. This gets my everything now.

Elliot Smith croons gray winds to sleep. His music lends the feeling of back eddies, reversing the flow of rivers for a few moments. Later, after everyone had gone to bed, I accidentally cut my ring finger with a butterknife and needed to go the Emergency Room. I kept singing a Wheezer song in my head because I thought one of the lyrics said something about cutting the heart with a butter knife. After midnight when I got home, I looked up the lyric to find that I was way off. Cut my heart with a martyr's spike....

I find irony (or is it paradox) in almost cutting off my wedding finger with a butter knife, then finding out the lyrics to an important song from my past, which facilitated a bit of healing from time to time and even last night, actually say something different than I thought they said. The plot thins, not thickens.

Morning comes again and with my bandaged finger, I consider the syntax marriage and Wheezer lyrics. I am aware . . . but maybe its time to attach less meaning to all of it.