by tashmcgill | Sep 12, 2008 | Uncategorized
play me a minor chord, i have a sad song in my heart
and there is not a thing that you can do to ease the tide
there are no notes that match the dissonance of sorrow
the beauty of the darkness falling, the sad little tune
play me a minor chord, follow it with thirds and then a 7th
by the time the dawn arrives, we’ll be through me and you
me to go my own way with this sad new song and you, to where you go
down to the dark, lonely depths that i cannot, will not go
i have a sad song in my heart
i have bought you sunshine
tattooed wisdom on my shoulders
til i’ve been going backwards
but we’ll be through, me and you
enjoy these final notes, this last reprise another chorus line
i’ll write you one last soaring melody with notes of gray
shading blue along the wake, stay up all night to finish off the ache
wine bottle emptied alongside the minor chords we’ll write tonight
we’re so much better in the melancholy a sad retreat wasn’t fooling anybody
for i am magnet to the foolhardy, fools and i am the biggest fool of all
there is a foolish colour to all these minor chords and fooling words
nobody gets fooled anymore, the melody of my love is a breaking curse
could i be sent, sent out into the night, by the dawn a parcel of light
play me a minor chord, i have a sad song in my heart
and there is not a thing that you can do to ease the tide
there are no notes that match the dissonance of sorrow
the beauty of the darkness falling, the sad little tune
by tashmcgill | Aug 28, 2008 | Uncategorized
“There is no such thing as a worthless conversation, provided you know what to listen for. And questions are the breath of life for a conversation.”
James Nathan Miller
excellent words from my friend bruce morley in the fall of 2006..
Over a lifetime I’ve played hundreds of different musics, much of it for
money as a professional. It’s been my experience that any music that
abrogates to itself a claim to purity, incorruptibility or metaphysical
significance etc eventually runs headlong into the secular,
hypocrisy-inducing fact that the methods of propagation, distribution, and
attempts to gain widespread acceptance or recognition of said music/s can
differ but little from any employed by “lesser” musics. This has been the
bete noir of the blues, earnest folk music, and new age music, to name but
three. (After several million $, a few Cadillacs, and a few publicity
stunts, can BB King still sing the blues? Nobody seems prepared to admit he
hasn’t made a decent significant album in decades.) In this respect, pop
music is more honest – it simply gets on with a job which is determinedly
ephemeral, where lasting significance is almost accidental, and where
money-grubbing success is regarded as a very worthwhile aim indeed. Can
millions of consumers of this be wrong or deluded ? Actually, in my book,
they can, but that doesn’t alter the hard fact that success on the same
scale for more esoteric musics will require a dance with the Devil, and you
can’t have it both ways. Like religion, the charge of hypocrisy awaits any
music that claims sainthood.
Left Then, What For You?
Only that you are the heart of my heart and the breath of my gasping, the wound of my flesh, the light bouncing off my iris. This one breath, song and dance for you still what does it mean… nothing…
For you would miss it all, eyes cast off in another pallid and dull direction..
Life then, found in these limbs, in this embrace
Truth in these words, my songs alive for your sake
Your strength long sought found in my willingness to lay in your arms
that is strength and truth, that you are strong enough for me..
by tashmcgill | Jul 23, 2008 | Uncategorized
my soul’s only true satisfactin
i have tasted and seen the delights of this earth
wronged both man and God in my selfish pursuits
but i know now, as before i never could
only you love away the thirst
there is an ache that comes up from my womb
an empty throb that beats within my heart
a longing that is waiting, now for yo
in you i’m satisfied, in you i’m satisfied
i’ll be more than i ever could’ve been
in your cautious tender hands
in your strength that covers over me
you bring me dignity yet humble me
oh the innermost, the deep and softest parts
are only for your eyes to love
you cover me from my own nakedness
lend me your flesh to cover me
my satisfaction is the nearness of your love
the knowledge you have taken me wholly
and brought me into Love
there is an ache that rocks my deepest soul
there is a beat and echo through it all
there is a longing for my Saviour, a path
so sweet i’ll bear it all for it tells me i am yours
that my soul to you is cleaved
by tashmcgill | Feb 14, 2008 | Poems, Prose & Poetry
once in the shadow of a dark moon
caught in the lamplight flicker
hope danced on a black sky
dimples of light where her feet landed
hope knows how to dance on the deep darkness
in the depths she latches on with fury
curls up her will into lightening
eyes flash and spirit leaps
i am living beyond the horizon
my whole life long
you’ll never catch me
nor trample the starlight I leave behind
by tashmcgill | Nov 18, 2005 | Short Stories
A Life Lived In Installments
Last night I told my story – at least all the important bits, to a complete stranger. When strung together, the instalments I have lived within, the pieces and palette that have shaped and fashioned me… sound like a cliche.
A Small Disgrace.
1. A Simple Untruth.
A lie starts with a whisper.
If you listen carefully to the words, the untruths slip with a heavy breath from the mouth. You have to be attuned to it of course, the slight catch in the throat, followed by the husky expulsion of warm air before the sound forms fully over the vocal chord. Ears twitch and listen for it in the hum of a café as your girlfriend recounts her Saturday night. You listen for small exaggerations, out of place adjectives and tinges of hesitation in her sentences.
The beginning of a simple untruth, like a loose thread that pulled too tightly threatens to unravel the fabric of a life. These sorts of untruths are shades of the truth in amongst lies, half-lies, half-truths and the Truth itself.
In this particular life, the simple untruths are rapidly growing out of control, and things are quickly unraveling. Although day by day, it goes unnoticed, without any measure of control the whispers are overwhelming truth and soon she will be lost in deception, hidden in the shadow of a small disgrace.
A small disgrace once kept out of view, but now being revealed as gently as a blanket is unraveled thread by thread.
2. Nothing happened today.
That was the first half-truth that was spoken from her lips.
At least, it was the first half-truth of any importance. Previously, white grey lies had only been in regards to trivial things like boys, using her sisters’ perfume, her mother’s make-up, how much homework there was left to do and the reasons why she was late to class. Simple lies that never connected or added to anything. But today her throat did catch, and her voice was husky as she formed the words so uncertainly.
“Nothing happened today.”
It was a foolish lie to begin with, because much happens every day between the sun rising and setting; the delivery of milk and the collection of rubbish on Monday mornings. All of these things had happened today. What she was trying to say, was that nothing important happened today.
But even that was a half-truth because it was the sum of insignificant things happening that Monday that led to the first situation she had ever willingly and knowingly covered with deceit. At first, she kept the dangerous truth from her mother, and then from her sisters and father, until it became the truth that she was keeping from everyone. That is when the unravelling began.
3. A Monday of Insignificant Events.
Mondays are not always pleasant and this particular Monday was no exception, besides being her 17th birthday. After a breakfast, she walked to school. Schoolyards and classrooms are the birthplace of many half-lies and untruths. For her, school is both triumph and tragedy, a place she escapes to with questions and ideas. Neither a genius or a fool, she engages with the marvellous possibilities of “what if?” in the schoolyard, because the rest of her life is dictated by pragmatism and realism. Although she doesn’t know it yet, she will spend the next 5 years determining exactly what extent one has to engage with reality. Her struggle both frustrates her and defines her; one of many things she will call character-shaping.
For now, she indulges in the books of great writers and history, calculus and chemistry equations inside a mind that is cluttered in the malleable form of a developing psyche. She is there, just under the surface and yet still becoming herself.
At 8.45am she is walking through the school gates, passing by younger students walking less confidently and classmates who look bored. She is however, wandering along a clifftop, face out into the wind looking at grey clouds breaking on the horizon. On the clifftop she feels powerful and small, and believes in God. She spends hours each day reminding herself why she believes in God.
Not because she is scared of not believing, but because she is scared of forgetting.
