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VERSE I wouldn't try to kid anyone into believing that I am trained in, or even very knowledgeable of, poetry. Aside from a few of the classics, I have tended to find poetry precious and false, too often carried by the dramatic form itself. It is as if there are beats and pauses and resolutions that are framework-independent of accompanying words. Plug in some sentiment and edge and voila! -- you have poetry! That said, I view lyric writing as a poetic form, and certainly aspire toward poetic ends. Exhibits are included here. * * * * * * I have come to regard "The Clues" as my own Dante's Inferno, a descent into the nightmarish confusion of broken heartedness, including eternal pain. The Clues ©RAR 2008 I was young and not too quick to It seemed like time stood still A dark bird flew across the sun I was young and not too fit With all that time to fill Then morning came and I arose All my life you been around This life ain’t rich enough I was young and all alone It seemed like moss grew round my brain But time has come, time has gone This life ain’t rich enough
I Can Hardly Believe How Hard It Was to Be Me Before the Internet ©RAR 2007
I can hardly believe how hard it was to be me Before the Internet
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Riding On A Zephyr ©RAR 2005
Riding On A Zephyr is a song born of a childhood memory. There used to be a passenger train that ran between Chicago and Denver called the Denver Zephyr. (Zephyr was the Greek and Roman God of the refreshing west wind.) There it became the California Zephyr for the leg from Denver to Oakland. For reasons now lost to me, my mother and I rode the Denver Zephyr when I was a kid in the late 1950s and in memory it was one of those foundation events. Though the line had operated since 1931, the Zephyrs seemed like real Cadillacs in their day, symbols of American technological wonder. To me, looking back, they represented the confident plunge into the future that was the American experience of the 1950s. History, however, didn't stop at that moment of serene naiveté. As a nation, we were in the grip of historic events. I could see it in my own family, as my father in his career was swept by a wave of technology that carried him from the age of television to the race for outer space. Along the way something went terribly wrong -- for all of us. That is what Riding On A Zephyr is about.
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