her_name_doesn't_rhyme_with_anything raze i had to chase her a little. i don't like to chase people anymore, but i had a feeling it might be worth it this time. one of those little whisper feelings. the kind that makes itself an invisible bird, perches on your shoulder, and says, "whisper whisper." pictures and flesh are two different things. i see pictures and think, "good god, you're beautiful." when flesh meets flesh, and eyes are there to see it done, there's that same thought again, but it's got a brother now. the brother's name is "you remind me of the last person i kissed well and was well-kissed by, in some intangible, impossible to put my finger on way." maybe a smoky voice thing. maybe a red hair thing. maybe a face and height and general body proportion thing. maybe all of those things. she's married, thank christ. i can kill any unwise butterflies there might have been before their wings come in and feel fine about it. better than fine. but still. that's a funny brother thought there. people don't often remind me of people that way. don't go growing any sisters, brother thought. don't you dare. she has this voice that screams soul. a voice that could lead a gospel choir to higher ground. if you were writing something you might hope to have someone with a voice like that sing, you would think "uptempo soul stomp thing" before you knew you were thinking anything. and yeah, that's what i thought when i first heard her sing. the voice wants to take the mind there. go mind go. go down where slow secrets go to reinvent themselves as nimbler creatures. but see, my brain wants to kick thoughts like those in the shins hard enough to snap bone and use the pain-induced delirium to turn the thoughts, warp them, make them something other than what they were born to be. my brain says: what if you took that voice and made it the messenger for a dark folk song with no chorus? what then? well, this then. tonight. voices transform words and melodies just by being themselves. it's fascinating. i was lucky enough to hear it happen again, to be in the same room with it as it happened. because it is a thing. an energy thing. a transference thing. when i sang the thing, i liked it just fine. when she sang the thing back to me, i thought, "this is the voice that was meant to sing these words. it never could have been any other way." she becomes the character the song wants her to be. if i close my eyes i can see her there inside its heart. she's come down the other side of the mountain she took a long time to climb, and made her way back around to where you are, and you aren't even you yet, aren't even real, but she wants to tell you what she's seen and how it's going to be. she's giving you the map of your life, if only you had hands to grasp it with. sometimes the chase is worth it. 150610 ... raze she thought she could do better than what she did. she's crazy. what she did was perfect. i guess beauty really is in the eye of the beer-holder. i think i was able to convince her, maybe. you can't mess with the magic. 150612 what's it to you? who go blather from