Of the Pen and the Sword

Last week I met a blogger who named his site after his favorite song lyric. That day I heard a song on the radio and for some reason this lyric grabbed me:

Don’t get me wrong if I split like light refracted.

I spent the rest of that car ride thinking about how brilliant that line is and how amazing it is that someone worked it into a song and it actually made sense. Chryssie Hynde sings it without sounding like her mouth is full of marbles, a feat that I have yet to reproduce, even though I tried several times. It must take lots of alcohol (I am much more talented in some areas when I’ve had something to drink – like billiards, and imitating Nancy Kerrigan).

Song lyrics and certain lines in movies and television will get me going like that. I just sit and think about them and wish I had been the one to write them. I think songs are the modern popular equivalent of poems. I know there’s still poetry being written, but I don’t really get poetry. I subscribe to the New Yorker, and it publishes poetry, but honestly, none of it touches me the way certain songs do. Duh, most of them don’t even rhyme. I feel the same way about art. I don’t get art. A Rothko is a blurry blend of colors. A Pollock is a splattery chain-saw massacre mess. I could totally do that if I tried. Nobody is lining up to pay me untold sums of money for my messes. Also, spray painting elephants in an airplane hangar in Santa Monica to symbolize poverty and hunger? Not art. Just ridiculousness.

So anyway – I have long regarded some of my favorite songwriters as poets. Point your finger and laugh if you will (this is becoming my new mantra, because if you do it, I don’t really care) but I list among them

Courtney Love/Hole: I got a blister from touching everything I see.

Emily Saliers: A love so fierce it burns like baby stars.

Billy Joel: They never told you the price that you’d pay for things that you might have done.

Alanis Morrissette: You from New York, you are so relevant. You reduce me to cosmic tears.

Prince: Overcast days never turned me on but something about the clouds and her mixed.

Etc. etc. yadda yadda yadda, because I am not the poet I wish I could be. I will include here a line in a movie I saw recently because I am on the topic. From the DVD closet, we pulled out the first Pirates of the Caribbean, which we tried to watch when it first came out but fell asleep on it for some reason. The scene: Will Turner bristles when Captain Jack pulls a pistol on him during a swordfight.

Turner: You cheated!
Jack: …Pirate. (as if to say, duh, what did you expect?)

That’s some funny stuff there, kids, for a sleep deprived movie lover who lost half her brain during childbirth. Now let me get back to my iPod.