Note: This Is Possible

A special message from the head office:

Do you remember that day when you ran for the train? No? You squinted against the sun to cross against the light and your eyes looked like root beer, flecking brown and yellow as they pierced the middle distance? Well, then you must remember that strand of hair you tucked behind your ear just before you stepped off the curb. Your right ear. Your left foot. ...No? Your lips looked like they did on your deathbed, a little pale though a little painted on, and I thought: these are the lips that ate, that kissed, that formed air into expression; and then they pursed in anticipation of the evening and what must be done in its fading light. No recollection, huh? That's fine. I'll remember for you.

Remember how you sat restlessly in Algebra class, your adultifying body struggling against the confinements of the desk? Your face as inchoate as the volcanic ocean floor, every labored shift dislodging discomfort, and potential. No? How about your voice, filtered like a chained animal's, curbed to a taut coil yet ready to speak, to answer against its weight? Wow. OK then, try this one: Remember how you would eat lunch, your shoulders tightly hunched, your arms a gate, on guard? You would quickly sneak food into your mouth, and chew as if with shame? You would save your milk for the whole meal and drink it at the end without a breath. Hmm. Later you became a minister and nurtured a whole community with your patience and dedication. Oh, THAT you remember. All right. I got the rest.

Remember when you sat alone at the bottom of the stairs, underneath Michigan Avenue, right outside Billy Goat's? You looked so despondent, or high. Did you know you looked high? Drunk at the very least, and at 7 p.m. Maybe that's why no one came to help you, even though you looked so in need. You sat at the base of those dirty stairs with your hands covering your face and your hair covering your hands and you looked like someone whose whole spirit had been crushed. Remember? You thought the entire world was lost to darkness; you were falling, alone, with no hope of redemption. And now you don't even remember it. See? Sorry to bring it up. But see?

Do you remember that train ride out to your parents? It was Labor Day weekend and the light had already turned. Do you remember you had that red-penny hair then, thinning? You wore those thick lenses, it was before the surgery. You were thinking, "Can I do better than this one?" And everyone who knew you was thinking that, too. You were still wearing the leather, it was before it looked like an affectation, or more of an affectation. Your mind was absent but wandering, you were thinking of a dish with ginger, and of Tammy from college, and who was the actor in that show? You breathed in and out forty-eight hundred times on that trip and the Earth rotated five thousand miles. We were idols then. False idols, but idols nonetheless. No memory? It's OK, it will always be OK. You just stay on that train, and I'll meet you there.

The Sphinx 2

The sphinx has seen them come and go. The strong and the wrong, the wise and the wicked, the haughty and the lowly. She has seen elegant structures and torrents of chaos. Great swirling embers of power, and heart, and loss. She has stood both outside the gate and inside the gate, and found them to be the same place. The sphinx has endured the chattering sandstorms of the ages, and has remained unmoved. In her defense, it must be noted that she is made of 270 tons of stone. The sphinx is mostly sedentary.

The sphinx has lived through alphabets and minarets, prophets and parapets; she has emerged smoothened and wizened and so free of fear. She has eaten the choking dust of memory and been fed. She has seen breadths of time lap against impossibly distant shores and even still, she has not yet seen everything. Why is there always something new? What fresh momentum moves these crossing currents, turns these driving wheels, dances these many, many feet?

It's worth considering that the sphinx may not know. Her tears are long dried, baking daily in the punishing heat. For all her years, what has she accrued beyond survey? Her untold wrinkles are untelling. What has she seen but the sights? The world is set in motion, adrift but alight, and our human countless nows weigh nothing.

Our time is weightless but our actions have force. We can run circles around the sphinx, but we can also run forward. Run ecstatic, run through the gates, run in time as though time could never catch up. No, the sphinx does not know. She will never blink or lift a paw. We are the ones, the sands that blow, and breathe, and build.

A message from Steve Howe

Dear Fans,

Despite my best efforts otherwise, I have become ugly. Some of you may quibble with my choice of the word "become," but I hear no dissent on the adjective "ugly." For it is true, I repulse. Though no one will tell me directly, it is as clear as the face on my face. I feel I owe you an explanation.

Why has Lady Time left others ennobled and dignified in their accrued appearance while rendering me analogous to a moldering stump of lichen? Why have I been especially chosen as canvas for her full panoply of ravagements? It is not karma, for I have been as good, or bad, as many others. Neither is it hereditary, for I could easily afford to gaze upon my parents, even upon their deathbeds, though I may more closely resemble them in their current states.

Did it happen suddenly, I hear you ask, ominously attentive to your possible future as a craggily dissolute, loathesomely-visaged sexegenarian? (Who, I might add, is to this day still very popular in Japan, where they enjoy a thriving horror film industry as well as greater sympathy for the Hibakusha.) Or did it happen slowly, bruised and burnished like the icy, pock-marked surface of Ganymede? Perhaps it was the drugs, or lack of drugs, or the injurious ultrasonic vibrations of Jon Anderson's voice? Would death have not been preferable, my mirror asks me, daily?

I suppose by way of explanation, I have no explanation. In my defense, I do not force myself upon your eyes. You do not see Asia music videos on your television. I did not appear in "Rocky Horror Picture Show." All of my public appearances are witnessed voluntarily by paying fans. My website does not feature a photo section. You do not see me on the cover of People, Fangoria or The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. You will not see me on a package of Ipanema or Iams. It is not me on the Preparation-H instructions of use.

I would hope that my music would speak for me. I play a mean guitar. Close your eyes and that's what you need to know about me. The rest is gravy, or looks like it. If you poured it over kimchi, offal and barbershop dustpan. But enough about me.

regrets,
Steve "don't look now" Howe