On Fire and Feeling Alright

 I can feel the sweat pouring off of me. 

Only feedback screaming and soaring around the brick basement, under yellow garden lights. Holding the moment.

Joseph is watching me and I am keeping eye contact. For when the moment needs to break.

Jane, waiting, glances at her scribbled notes. Hank is letting his last chord, high on the neck, ring out.

I start nodding my head to Joseph and I can feel the pulse building inside of me. He feels it too. I can tell. We build off of each other and we build well. Tapping in to similar patterns and references and spontaneities. In that basement, under those yellow lights, we build. 

I am nodding and the moment needs to end.

Jane looks at me and is ready. Hank will get there exactly when he wants to.

Soon Joseph starts quickly building on the tom and snare and in four quick hits the moment explodes apart. 

The basement erupts in a thick and heavy blanket of chords. Pounding and infinitely dense. Heavier than we've been in a long time. I'm more excited than I've been in a long time. I'm present. 

I'm there. 

In that shattering moment I feel what I felt a year ago. I'm smiling behind my drenched and erratic hair, flying wildly around me as I'm hunched over, stomping my foot and beating the fucking life out those five strings.

It's a song we worked on a couple times over the last year but it never felt right. It never fit. Until tonight.

The chords give way to melodies and the melodies give way to shrieking leads. Drums explode like mortars and it feels like Jane is going to pull the fucking house down on top of us and I am smiling. 

Eight measures. Thirty seconds of weightlessness. Two chords of total and all consuming bliss and I step to the microphone and months of sadness and anger and rage, seconds of joy and excitement and relief all pour out of me.

Words I absent-mindedly tapped into my phone who knows how long ago. A dream I had. Driving in flames. Careless and burning and knowing I too will become ash and I hope that seeing me here, seeing me sing, hearing my voice will satisfy whatever you feel about me. Who fucking cares what that is.

I'm screaming. 

I hope you saw what you came here to see.

I hope you saw what you came here to see.

I hope you saw what you came here to see.

I hope you saw what you came here to see.

And I do. I hope it was worth it. Because for me, burning and careless, soaked in this moment of cacophony

I am here.

I am back.

I am alive.

I am on fire and feeling alright.