Carole Made It Look Like A Cakewalk

Lately I’ve been dying to write a song. There’s all this poetic shit sitting on my heart and curling up into my lungs and I feel it all the time. I want to say something about a man who lost his beauty when he sold out his dreams, about a reluctant hero, about a girl who is everything to everyone but herself. But I can’t. Despite ten years of piano, four of music classes, two brothers who compose on the guitar and years of singing in public, I’m hampered by my inability to put three notes together and make them sound like anything other than chopsticks.

Perhaps I should have paid attention to the music theory poor Mrs. Palmateer begged me to learn instead of hammering away at the Icehouse and Billy Joel sheet music I got free at the mall. I’ve tried for years to blend notes into phrases that melt into songs, but it’s as if I am missing that part of the brain entirely. Despite the overwhelming sense of having an entire symphony on the tip of my tongue, I simply cannot write anything but words.

And without the music it’s just bad poetry that doesn’t rhyme.