Orange Juice Concentrate

As I get older, I transform from a laser of concentrated strength to sunlight vast and open, falling on a field. I move from songs that pierce to songs that nurture, or at least try to encourage. A strange time.

I miss being unyielding, moving away from my source without apology, but time dissipates me. Wisdom, it turns out, is no laser but warmth spread out. I can feel in my writing the warrens of rabbits, the centipede under the rock, the need to shepherd everything that ever happened to me and to let the corners speak. Somehow, some way, the counterfactual arguments, the possibilities, the possible pool-ball collisions of my choices are given flesh and story out of my control, and rather than govern, I watch, perhaps gently influence.

Perhaps by my birthday in August I will have my Big Broadway Record done with songs like “The Joys of the Road,” which address this change of being. It is a natural process to disperse, opening a meter per light year, until the photons are not crowded together in photonic ghettos but spread out among thousand-acre estates. Wisdom is watching whatever it is I kept to myself propagate unmolested in the endless summertime farms, words and instinct, melody, threnody.

And somehow there are paragraphs between the above and here where I work in a metaphor about Orange Juice Concentrate that amuses you and makes you think, “Hey, if Volpe can do it…”

Every blessing,

Mark