Poem Series: Until I Do

UNTIL I DO
Liz Fink-Davenport

The thing about love is that I can never do it right. I do it too hard. I do it all awkward and gangly. Like two teens with braces kissing. I do it too brokenly. I don't do it. Then I do it to wrong places. I do it and it gets handed back to me. Or thrown at me. Or pressed down under someone's shoe and stuck a bit there like parking lot gum. I do it with fear and holding. I never do it. I do it all over the damn place. I'll not do it again. I promise. I messy do it. I do it and then it does me. I do it like a shotgun flare into the dark. I do it with quaking hands. I do it tearfully and close eyed and a bitten lip. I do it with my chest thrown open and a wolf cry to the moon. I do it in inside pockets. I do it with a swear that I'm not really doing it. I stop it. I stop it. I stop it. I screw it all up into the worst kind of ugly. I pick it apart like tangled necklaces. I find it. I hide it. I hold it overhead and dance naked around the fire with it. I put it in a box, in the dark, in a cupboard, in a house, that is sealed. I hold it. I rock it. I soothe it. I toss it like a baseball and never go search for it over the fence. I kill it. I hurt it. I strangle it until there is no breathe and no beating organ. I bury it. I mourn it. I birth it and I cry how beautiful it is. I tuck it into my breast when it is frightened. I say nasty words to it. Oh, how nasty. I tell it I would rather never have met it. Never have laid eyes on its face. I tell it I hate it. I don't mean it. And I do. I want it back. I beg for it. I try to make it drink the water I bring to it...but it's not thirsty. I pull it along like a mossy anchor and a rope. I misplace it. I make it be sorry it ever met me. Regret my face. I make it look me in the eye and then I'm the one that flinches. I start it. I start it. I start it again. I do love all wrong. I never get it right. I will not do it again. No. Never. Until. I do. Dammit. I do.

Artist Spotlight: You Can Only Imagine

You Can Only Imagine is the graphics (photos, video, design, and more) of Damien McLean. His photos include everything from capturing the energy of live rock shows and burlesque performances to wedding day and newborn bliss, and his photo of Miles Osland was recently featured in Downveat Magazine.

Below is a samplig of his surrealism. Enjoy!

Artist Spotlight: Gregory

Musician, author, poet...and visual artist. Original art taken from a sampling of his baker's dozen of solo releases over the years. Enjoy (and enjoy his music at the link HERE).

Poem Series: ~The Creases~

~The Creases~

Liz Fink-Davenport

It's late. So stop. Just...stop. My heart is broken enough. Splintered. And scattered. And all the pieces have spun and slid under the refrigerator to mixed in with the sticky dust and in dark corners and settling into cracks in the blackened floor next to the crumbs. Never to be swept up. Never to rejoin with the whole. Always lost always left always less. I have little. And it is fragile as the web across a lamp, heated until brittle and brushed away with fingertips clumsy and cruel and selfish, reaching for the switch. Off. On. Off. On off. You want light. Because you are frightened. And you want to visit now. Sit in my room and rewind days. Talk softly in the glow. Rewind and watch the good parts. Rewind. "That was the best...when you put your long fingers across your lips to hide your curled grin...but I saw...oh, it was the best. Remember?" You poke and touch with a thick thumb. Pick at all the scabs and raised pink scars. What's this? How did you get this? Why is there a bandage? Let me see.

Leave. Get out. You are unwelcome here. Not in this room. Not this touching. No rewinds. No fingers tangled in my hair so familiar. No reward of a memory for you. The parts of my heart all over the house...shards...cry out together. Get out. Get the hell out. You shake your head no. You have tear welled eyes. Get. Out. And then....it's just me. On the floor. In the creases. In pieces. And draped over a lamp. In the dark. Until you come again...and switch on the light. Unwelcome but missed.

Artist Spotlight: Joshua McLean

We've featured his work here before....and now FIVE more, just for you!

Poem Series: WHIM

WHIM

Liz Fink-Davenport

You are the closest thing I ever felt to home.
A welcome mat smile with a fireplace laugh,
Knowing I could collapse into you when the gravity of everything else
turned my bones to shackles.
When life held me down against my own will,
Shoved my face in gravel, gasps for breath between mouthfuls of dirt.
I could kick off my shoes and rest in you.
Rest in a place that I was always meant to be.
Because it was always supposed to be us.
At least, that’s what I tell me.
And I never feel more safe than when I can look up at your constellations.
Slip off Orion’s Belt,
And you can slip into me.
Every song that’s ever given me tingles.
Every hug that reminded me why humans need to touch.
Every moonlit secret that traveled from my lips to yours.
Every broken promise to myself.
Every sleepless night trying to figure out when the path to your door became so hard to find.
Every attempt to cling to us.
My heart broken and mended and rebroken infinite times an hour.
I think you need,
Happiness that lingers over your days and stabs joy into dark recesses.
You want play. And light. And no mess.
And I'm mess. And I'm undoing. And I'm chaos.



My heart is strung to you by a tiny red thread that is tied at your wrist.
Like a child's balloon. Tethered. And I wait. Poised between heaven and sky
And your wrist,
That tugs. To home. At its own whim.

Poem Series - Jolted

JOLTED
Liz Fink-Davenport


"And on that day when I am not sure if I can take my heart and jam it back into its tight cage. Or force my lungs to repeat a rolling rhythm. Or pull one muddy foot from the sucking ground and burden it to move a heavy inch forward. I can't. A levitation at the corners of your lips pulls my intentionally forced life into lightness. Oh, that smile. From across the room and through a mass of nondescript faces on the sea, it puppeteers my mouth with invisible threads and curls what was flatlined, jolts a heart into beating. It shoots out from where it hits hard first until even my fingertips and hair is on glowing blue fire."

Poem Series: Liz Fink-Davenport

The first in a series.....

Watch

I measure time in the moments of being with you and without you. And the longing in between.

It is ticked out in the second hand of your blink and your sigh and your warm breath and each small movement of your hand.

So stop the harsh clock in the hall and quiet down the world while I keep my own time. By the soft beats of my heart...waiting. On yours.

Lexi Awards set for January 31

The 2nd annual Lexington Music Awards (aka Lexi Awards) show is scheduled for Sunday, January 31 at the historic Lyric Theatre in Lexington, KY.

Nominations ballot will be available soon via Lexi's web-site, blog, and FB page.

Nominees will be announced next month, along with announcements for MCs, performers, and celebrity presenters.

Stay tuned for more details.

Failure, Fear and The Future

by Paulie Felice


Staring at a blank page.

But in writing just that one little line... poof!

It's no longer a blank page.

I see this in my guitar students all the time; arms poised, eyes slightly glazed over with a nervous half-smile, frozen before me. I've just asked them to "play something," just as my new editor here has asked me to "write something."

"Write what??"

Anything.

"Play what??"

Anything.

The blank slates intimidate us. The impossible vastness of nearly infinite possibilities can be paradoxically paralyzing. In writing as in playing, it's that very first step that is the most difficult. I suppose most things are that way. We fear the unknown, and what is more 'unknown' than The Future? The immediate future of notes unplayed and words unwritten; it's right in your face, daunting, infusing you with irrational terror over the simplest of actions.

We usually really want a plan, first. If we can just have some vision, some picture of the future, we can be less fearful. Tell me what to write about. What key should I play in? What's this post going to be about? What's this song going to feel like? How am I going to make a living if I live my dreams? Where will I live and what will I eat and what if I... fail?

The future intimidates us because it is unknown, but what we fear about the unknown is the possibility that we will fail when we get there. And right here, right now in the present, we have not failed yet because we have not embarked on the endeavor. That's the paralyzing aspect, because we're hardwired to protect ourselves from harm. But I think that we have a misunderstanding of what failure is and our fear of it is exceedingly amplified and irrational because of this.

Failure is not the worst-case scenario.

The worst thing that can happen is... nothing.

Stagnancy, perpetual limbo and indecision, being stationary and allowing the paralysis to consume you; these are the things to legitimately fear because they always result in the only true, absolute failure, and that's the failure to move. Motion is what makes all things in the universe matter. It is the only way to affect change and create progress, and the only reason to have goals. If you have goals you MUST MOVE in order to achieve them. The potential for failure is always preferable to the guarantee of failure. If you do not move, you absolutely WILL FAIL.

So move.

Just go.

No plan.

Embrace the fear and in doing so, convert the nothingness of stagnancy into the awesome power of movement through infinite possibilities in infinite combinations. Swing your arm and strike those chords. Move your fingers and write those words. Walk out the door and into the expanse of your new life.

Stop stopping. Get going. Do something.

"Do what??"

Anything.