Michael Rastovich

I am reminded of moutain rise and glacial fall. Of seasons and centuries and time beyond all counting. How this stone came to be a lying at my feet.

Every stone has a story that you haven’t time to know. But you may remember, being there, when it first began to snow.

His own voice was nothing but croaks and gargles. All gravel and snot. But he had a peculiar talent, a particular gift where he could cover the songs of others note for note. Every trill and flourish in perfect pitch.

He became quite a sensation after the great collapse and filled the grandest theaters in the greatest cities throughout the world.

Eventually though the the crowds began to thin and the venues got smaller and small still, until this night the curtain rose to an audience of one and he knew, this was his last show.

He held nothing back that night. He gave it all. It was his best show ever, performed for one lonely old man seated center, second row back who never stirred, whose shirt was soaked with tears.

When the final curtain finally fell he remembered every show. The crowds, the applause, the adulation, the ovations. And as he stepped into the slient dawn, he knew he would remember this show most. The last show, for the last man, who still remembered, there where songbirds once.

He found his self in town
All alone and naked.

He could not get alone enough
Alone is all he calls his own.

It’s the naked part
That breaks his heart.

He needs a place to hide things away,
A place to keep his brushes out.

My hope is that my blossom, but a bud, lies still yet in my heart ready to unfold if ever that golden light might fall upon it.

My fear is that the very last feather has been plucked and these wings will never know the sky.

One by one they walked away and slowly it was emptied of all it’s purpose and all it’s memories. It was once but is no more. Only the healing scars from the scratches of those who lived there remain as if to say, we now return to our regular programming already in progress.

It is in these places that I am comforted it whispers to me – No one is here now, they shall not return. In this place you are safe.

It is not only ghost towns. All abandoned and peopleless places call to me. A corner of a garden in full view with the thinness of winter now obscured and forgotten in  the fullness of summer is for a season at least, – abandoned.

A usually busy street but as luck would have it, everyone is away on holiday. A schoolroom with no school today. No students crowding or teachers crabbing. The Hall before or after the dance. Empty. Abandoned. Vacant.

In a church in mid week between the next sermon and the last, I can glory in the empty that is all. For me that curtain closes once people take their seats.

It seems to me that in the company of others there is a rush to madness. All primping posing and politeness. My authenticity is strangled so that the group can breath. Each such experience leaves me dull and dismembered. After a lifetime of such encounters I am left with a bag of parts and i have forgotten how it all goes together.

So I am off in search of ghost towns and forsaken places to feel the shape of empty spaces and be alone to become all one.

It rings a chord in me to see the awkward the foolish the less than normal stand before their judges and endure the slights and jokes at their expense, then perform to reveal that they are not any of the things they were thought to be or perhaps in spite of them, they turn out to be and always were, extraordinary.

How many things how many others do we harshly judge or cast aside without ever hearing the song they sing.

It is not that moment of enlightenment and shame of the scornful. It is the moment when the light of the scorned has at last been seen. The song of the slighted is finally heard, and it is extraordinary.

Freewill is the branches

that grow as they please

Fate is the tree

that was always a tree.

The way we are going is nice enough but must we go so fast.

Could we go slow or stop a bit, and sit along the way.

It all seems to lose a little luster as we go speeding past.

Sometimes, in the garden of life, one should dead head the memories that have lost their bloom.

Everyone’s burning question is answered when at the begining of a disaster some fool leaps up and screams…

“We’re all going to die!

The meaning of life is everything that happens between now and the day you die.

The meaning of life is life it’s self, and …

“We’re all going to die!”