Almost A Ghost But Not If I Can Help It

For a while I thought I was a ghost after I heard Lyle Lovett and His Large Band. But then after I gave it some thought, I know that I really ain't no ghost. Or ain't like any of the usual ghosts you ever knowed.

All this thinking happened while I was listening to one of Lyle Lovett's CDs - of him and his Large Band. In that CD's songs I heard crisp, bluesy riffs reach out of my truck speakers and slap me right upside the head. Early before dawn this morning, en route from the house to work, I had Lyle on the CD and on the brain. And the heart.

It came from his guitars, guitars tightly strung and precisely struck. Oh there were some horns and such, but mainly it was Lyle and his guitar. Singing and ringing together they were a twisted thread on a needle, a metallic strand-sound that sewed my mouth shut as it opened other things. It was a sound that only God-favored flesh tipped fingers can play. I've tried to learn how to play guitar like that, like Lyle and his bandmates. I can't. Maybe I ought say not yet instead of can't. It's been four decades of trying, so I can't easily just say someday soon. Oh I can pick one up, strum it a bit, rattle the strings - but not open anybody up with what comes out.

But that's against what I can imagine in my head, the exactly-so if what I want heard coming off my fingertips. Sometimes I can feel it, too - how I'd feel if I, I had God-favored flesh on my fingertips. Have you ever felt like that before? Have you felt like that many times? Like you knew what you want to hear out of your mouth when singing. Like when you need, not just want to, you need to wail like Aretha Franklin; but that's not what comes out.

Like knowing what you'd like to see come out from under the sweep of your hand. If old China is your locale, it would be an inked brush in your hand, flying across rice paper. If colonial America is where you stood, it would be a pinched quill pen scritch scratching across parchment underneath your hand. Either a brush or a pen, but under your eyes, under your hand, a beautiful thing would come to be. A poem or a love letter or a Bill or Rights or a portrait of someone, but something you loved would take shape.

And the fruit of those talent blessed fingertips, it would be alive with feeling. It would pour out like sticky honey. Sweetness licked by another's hungry tongue. Breath blown over hair above another's soft warm ears. It would flow, it would softly blow, like a whisper it would go.Surely the message would go down in after over someone's fleshy ear lobe. Go down into the bones of their affections, and grasp their senses by the roots.

And then you'd know it - know not just that they but you too, were alive. That you had lived and you had loved and that's how you'd know it. You'd know it by the warmth of the other person's reaction, know it by their in-kind responsive heat. Know it by their nighness, of their drawing nearer to you. By your audience you would know - lover or even enemy, by their reaction you'd know you weren't no ghost.

Know this you would by the slight curl of a lip. Or a smile so rightly accented by some crinkle-wrinkles around the eyes. That's the trick to reading truth in faces, did you know that? Which is reading those little squints around the eyes.When the smile is sincere, they will be there. When it ain't, you still may have 'em in your grip but in a different way - better that you know that.

But what to do if you can't pull those metal stranded strings like Lyle Lovett? What to do if you can't push the trumpet notes around like Miles Davis, as smooth as a speed skater on ice? It's all about what to do to get a closed door open, and not just rattle the door knob like ghosts do - make a reach but without effect.

Shake people up with appearances, like some ghost who can reach out but can't touch? I don't want that, I want what results in a felt touch, a smile, a real resonant reaction. A chill down the spine is good, if it's the right time; but not the spooky kind. How to guarantee a warm blooded response I don't exactly know. Not yet do I know.

All I know to do is try what I'm doing now, which is to point you at something that moved me. I will tell you about it, I hope that it rattles your senses to the point of your feeling it, or at least an itch that makes you go scratch it. A hand on the shoulder is good, but even a prick on the skin will do. All this I do in hope it opens a door that's between us, one that is closed.

So I point out how Lyle Lovett sounds coming out of the truck speakers. Or I mention the song "Moondance" by Van Morrison, how that can spin you around (sometimes at night). Or I say you gotta listen to Miles Davis and his "Sketches of Spain". Ear stuff works real good for that kind of shake up wake up call. I might exhort you to listen to "Spem in Allium" by Thomas Tallis; 40 people it takes to sing it, but when they get it right there's no words to describe the places you go on that carpet ride of choral swell. Or hey, playing some psycho rockabilly by Reverend Horton Heat could do it, to get you out of your chair and your toes a scootin' across the apartment carpet, maybe.

Sometimes I describe how trees look in a forest mural painted by Thomas Hart Benton - how they writhe like live snakes that got by magic spell and patient strokes turned into wood. Remind you I might about how sitting on the hood of a rumbling muscle car can feel. You'll feel the heat move through you starting where you sit with feet on a hot chrome bumper, while you ponder the horsepower; you'd want to smoke your tires, turn heads, burn rubber and screech, to get the whole block's attention.

There's no good sense in hearing, seeing, feeling all this good stuff and keeping it to one's self. Got to use it like tinder to ignite heat in somebody else, in their - oh, where to put it? In their self, their heart, their mind, on their tongue, in their guts? Words for these parts of us are just handles not screwed into anything, sign not mounted on posts - no the real thing itself, not the 'where' where the feelings go inside us to be combusted and burn into vapor. Smoke - real smoke that you can smell is air more dense than puffed words; though sometimes the right words can cause us to smolder and smoke inside.

Whatever. You name it, I'll try to put it aflame. In any audience - lover, enemy, friend, or noncombatant. Others lit my candle here and there; so why shouldn't I do the same for others? I must do so, I must. And so must you. Because if we can light somebody up, we ain't no ghosts, are not apparitions just rattling door knobs in vain. Or if so, then I will be the best dang ghost there is around, bar none like you never seen. Cause when that door between us done gets opened, who cares how I spooked it into happening, it's opened. And then we can cross the threshold of divided worlds to see, touch, hear one another; share our muse, dance and fuse.

It's all that matters.