Fun with iTunes.

I just ran across a bunch of forgotten CDs and loaded them into iTunes. I'm listening to Depeche Mode's "Master and Servant" right now. What a trip. It's like stepping into a time machine, but the memories are actually kind of disjointed, and interestingly enough, they revolve more around Depeche Mode videos than anything else.

For instance, I'm remembering seeing for the first time the video to "I Feel You," from the Songs of Faith and Devotion album. I was living in Delaware at the time, teaching school and basically alone. To a large extent that album represented a re-visioning of the band, but that's not so much the important part to me. It's that remembering the video for that song brings me back to that moment in my life when I was intensely lonely and the television and my pre-internet computer were my closest companions. I wrote a lot back then, poetry and a good chunk of a novel that I abandoned when I left Delaware to attend graduate school, so I sat in front of my little Mac Classic with the 9 inch screen a good bit of the night, when I wasn't watching every single college basketball game espn broadcast between 1991 and 1993.

Anyway, here's some maudlin poetry from that period (no: I don't throw out anything):

A piece of something

Although you weren't in this town today,
and haven't been since two years to this day,
I have seen bits of you, or maybe pieces of what you do,
stuck, like old papers in crevices, in my life, wedged
in this little apartment between books and magazines,
the sad papers half-marred with uncompleted words --
an old promise to write, an address written
on a piece of ripped napkin
and stuffed into a drawer with other slips and receipts:
these are spilled from my memory (which was never complete)
and remembered only when found, like an old scar
from some forgotten wound.

I'm hoping that was an early draft. Dig this quick revision:

Although you weren't here today,
and haven't been since two years to this day,
I see bits of you, stuck
in my life, like old papers in crevices, wedged
in this little apartment between books and magazines,
the sad papers marred with half-thoughts--
an old promise to write, an address scrawled
on ripped napkin, stuffed
into a drawer among slips and receipts:
cast out of my memory (which was never complete)
and reconjured when found, like an old scar
from some forgotten wound.

It's still not terribly good, although I like the image of scraps of paper stuck in crevices -- and I think about the "found memories" of the old things that fall out of my books sometimes: store receipts, palmcards, folded over notes to myself, etc. So maybe one day I'll come back to the poem and rewrite it properly.

Until then, it's time to find my own ... personal ... jesus.