the cover

If they can't cheer the singer, at least let them cheer the song. That time soaked playlist, those favorites that you feel whatever your mood. The words you mouth without thinking, the singing that stays with you long past all the music being done. You can hear them in your silent places. You can see them written in the gravel in the road.

These songs we cleave to carry the distance between times, eras where the meaning was so vastly different that the sameness startles. They stick because the mirror smooth surfaces of our hearts cling to feelings true and familiar. There is a conversation in that conversion, a telling so fluid and feral it will never be captured or caged. The cover song sang to be quaint or ironic still rings in that place that language can never master, the unbidden intrusions of life. These songs sustain the strength of culture and the intimacy of living itself.

Blood speaks to blood, real feels real. You don't know the singer, but the song unfurls inside your veins. That warm heady draping, dreamlike and furtive, each verse drawing you out inside. That trance that opens the unseen door, the secret light that abides despite all this sin and ruin. The song goes on, resonating with the open window, playing in the light and glass. You are unlaced and bound, always so alive outside of time. So bright and obscure, that memory that serves only to make remembering automatic. Each place, each life, each bite taken-- another song breathed into a pillow. Another window lit from with-in.