To thine own self be true

(the oldest and most expensive, from 1972, a Gibson walnut 6 string-electric; I used it in my public band days from 1973-2002)

(a 12 string Yamaha acoustic–duplicates the Stones’ “As Tears Go By” and “Angie” sound)

(a 2002 6 string Tofino from Montreal’s McKenzie-Marr team who won their bid to start their company on Dragon’s Den, even persuading hard-headed Kevin O’Leary)

(the 2017 Rickenbacker 330 electric 12 string, which effectively captures the 1964-68 sounds of The Beatles, The Byrds, The Searchers, The Hollies, and The Turtles)

Different sounds for different songs, played thru an olde ’60s Fender Super-Reverb with a 1990 Alesis drum machine.

Elsewhere, musically, I am going to be back at the Edmonton Record Collectors’ Sale at the end of the month with a good range of oldie LPs–sealeds, signeds, and many vintage Spoken Word albums featuring many oldie poets, writers, and performers.

but it produced some memorable sunrises.

shows off his sticker art piece for Daddy and builds a Tinker Toy café for his two animal pals.

The dead fly on the bathroom floor by the vent. Where had he come from? And I remembered, this morning, turning on the heat for the first time this fall. Performing an inadvertent exit from the bowels of house inferno? Was my act of personal comfort responsible for his demise? Or was the corpse long dead from the summer or before that, and like a story of ancient tombs, removed by technology to the world of light, to human consciousness, like any newly-acquired knowledge or information.

If he had come from the vent, why had he gone there? A safe place? A potential new home? Or was he born there before being borne aloft with the heat coming on? So many mysteries. Regardless, his world had come to a close at some time. How little did he realize, in any case, that he would finish above ground, at first glimpsed by a human stranger, who then moved his body to see if he or she was alive or just a fly who had changed the course of maybe two mornings anyway.

And so I awoke
at long last in
a Bill Evans’ world.
Summer had come
and gone:
smoke, wind,
crows and magpies.

It was a more
human space
with leaves
on the move.
Overnight it
had rained and
I had overslept
the start of school
(again).

I took my time
re-starting out,
more sure of purpose
than ever before.
My dreams intact
like Bill’s piano
and now 2017
hardly mattered:
the hurricanes
fires and floods,
the fake politics
and agendas,
limitless stupidity
violence and greed,
Trump and the trolls.
Nullified [finger snap]
just like that.

(inspired by Bill Evans’ “Explorations” LP)

Top half played on acoustic 6; bottom half on acoustic 12. “Islands in the Mind” is an original instrumental.

I made one substitution, pulling  “Groovy Kind of Love”. Rest went over well.

My first public gig since the Strathcona grad at the Convention Centre in 2002.

(Castile, Spain)

In the musty cloister corridors
of Santo Domingo
are the voices of the ages
unexpectedly.
Men without women.
Men without guns.
Men assured of purpose sublime.
Re-gardless of time,
untouched by war, chaos
and the mad pursuit of money.
Here there is the grace of
melody sans harmony
and rhythm.
Here there is holy society
of the single melody
in language and tones
beyond your limitations.

Listen. It sounds like Peace.
It sounds like Soul
conversing with self.
It sounds like sanctuary, blessing
and forgiveness for
all and everything.

Leave all cares outside
the stones, this monastery.
Pettiness, ego,
control and strife.
Here there is only eternity
and a balm that none
of us likely deserve.
Listen to the songs as
they change keys
and time signatures
slowly, magically.

This is a transcendent life here
beyond your haste, your
real and imagined complications.
No one here lives beyond
the simple chants which
forever start each
passing day or century.
Within these walls,
the monks have found It.
A timeless Truth we all need,
having lost our ways
so many times in
life’s ever-changing journey.

(It was a very busy, spiritual August in many ways. The above poem was inspired by the famous, spiritual Chant CD by The Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos)

(photo by my daughter, reminiscent of van Gogh’s “Starry Night over the Rhine”, 1888)

(photos by my daughter on her trip of a lifetime to see the total eclipse with her companion; I have been ‘blamed’ for showing them a leaflet for a lecture by their old prof, Professor Hube, which I picked up at the Wild Bird Store, which inspired the epic voyage to the Pacific by car.)