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“At the point where I'm trying to force something and it's not happening, and I'm getting frustrated with, say, writing a poem, I can go and pick up the brushes and start painting. At the point where the painting seems to not be going anywhere, I go and pick up the guitar.”

-Joni Mitchell

           It’s one o’clock in the morning and I have finally taken my contact lenses out, drowning them in the clear chemical spray of generic six-hour formula. Someone outside my fifty-year-old cabin is playing the same four songs that every sleeveless-shirt-wearing-guitar-player knows on screaming repeat so, of course, I find myself blindly stumbling across the half-lit fake-marbling of floor, making my way into the song-filled mosquito night.

Without my contacts I am hopeless. Without alien pieces of soft plastics I simply cannot function. Right now, finding my eyes unarmed, I can barely make out the faces of the thirty men around me, let alone see the tiny bright pinpoints of the Palestine, Texas stars above or focus on the unknown animal shuffling in the overhanging branches. 

But I can still hear well enough.

I can hear the vibrations of  guitar strums and the low-octave grumbles of the Tom Petty songs around me. I can hear the worn plastic of the counselor's white guitar pick as it scratches the tightening stringwires. I can hear the laughter of thirty bare-chested strangers whose names that I do not remember.

Learning to Play Guitar

“You’re doing this for her,” I remind the

                                              frustrated me.

She won’t be impressed, though.

She won’t be cradled in my arms, captured by the sweet sounds

of my hand-me-down acoustic.

I know that.

But as I sit on the grassy carpet,

the browned instrument cradled in my arms

I let my fingers awkwardly meander up and

down the street of strings,

slowly sweeping away the sweet-smelling dust.

But it’s just not working; the guitar isn’t

                                                          Just isn’t.

So, I let each chord become a word in one of my poems,

fingers fumbling for a pen in the dark.

And the words struggle between the strings,

Transforming into a chain of staccatoed sentences,

Which rip through my cheap looseleaf.

I don’t think she’ll appreciate this

                                                This guitar

                                                 This attempt at something greater.

I’ll just give her this poem, instead.

I cannot remember right now because all I can remember are the bedroom nights of scrawled tabs and out-of-tune chords, slowly and carefully plotting in my head the stories of nights like these, where I would be the one leading the poorly-shaven populace with Oasis, Journey, and the radio anthems of other unknown artists, whose names I have long-ago forgotten but whose clichéd lyrics still live on through solely through my life-support flashlight campfires and fast-down improvises.

I blindly swore to keep them alive.