(based on a line from an old boucing souls song)


I am bound by only six strings to this world
When all the words fail me, they hold me alive
I turn them tight enough to snap
I beat my philosophies on them and 
It feels like war
They snap around me to prove I am alive
That there were songs in the madness
Of cold walks and bitter uneven coffee
Where I waited in my incubating uselessness
Where I dreamed more than thought

I swallowed the chilling daily air
I knew that I must discard these hours
The strings were pulling me back
To the place where I could touch
The sounds inside my head

Six Strings
On the loose and beaten body of a used guitar
And all my love so close
All my love alive beneath my hands
Like it never existed before

I cannot say who I sang the songs for
Since I first felt them on cheap shiny plastic wood
A treasure I purchased instead of lunch
When I was shy and twelve
I locked myself in the closet
Scraping away "Yellow Submarine"
With callusing fingers
Nothing felt more beautiful than that closet
With my dirty clothes nesting me in their center
And an inch of afternoon light under the door
That's when I noticed 
I couldn't feel where the guitar stopped and I began

Sometimes I sang and played for countless hours
Disappearing into my own screams and chords
My mother would force the door open 
To see me sitting there in the pale darkness
With my cheek flat against the wood
A single cold tear melting on my red cheek

I carried that guitar everywhere
Like a best friend whose hand you hold
And whisper secrets to
I became accoustomed
To patching its elderly body together
But it sang with thankful wisdon
It sange in the rain with drums behind it
It sang in our car on long road trips
Is sang with our full desert moon
Multiplied in our mirrors and windows
Like being caught in a star
With your mind's voice floating beside you
Or out fearless, rhymeless in the open air
No, the songs were not meant for anyone

Sometimes the beauty is survival
This tense callusing grasping at what I am
The adventure of holding on to a chord
So frail it could break
And throw me off the face of the earth
I've been to oblivion before, and it wasn't for me

Six strings
Condemn me to this life
And all my love so close
I know that I sang the songs for no one