Tihane

It’s hard to say
from where one person comes
and when they begin.

We think of wombs, of women and birthdays, using them merely as fixtures to focus the fumbling of our minds.

In reality, we know we came not from bodies, but from mystical lineages glimpsed only in glances between grandparents, accidentally uncovered history books, years spent soul searching, searching souls, and moments returning home, within.

In the literal sense, I was born in Los Angeles, California.

In the honest sense, I was most likely born thousands of years ago, somewhere amidst alternate universes, aqua underworlds and mathematically intricate meteor showers, somehow mysteriously managing to materialize here on Earth in the 21st century.

I am, as I believe all beings are, a bit of everything -

Singer, actor, writer, dancer, director - a strange slew of uncontrollable habits I tend to wind up in the one worded – ‘Poet.’

As a child, I stood constantly before the family fireplace, harassing every new stranger with new songs.

I concocted melodies across the monkey bars to keep myself company.

I heard the tape turning over in my mother’s karaoke machine, which mumbled, at all hours, Billie Holiday.

I spent years barefoot on Hawaiian shores, strumming my grandmother’s ukulele.

And later ran rampant, adolescent wild, howling to my father’s Pink Floyd.

I reached the rocky piers and monstrous steel of New York City, heart broken and wallet busted, where I fell in love with my best friend’s guitar.

I took to the Hudson Valley, wrote the weirdest novel and ran back to Manhattan.

I drove across country, moved back to Los Angeles, set up my turntables and candles, crystals and harmonicas on a pile of books near the tin can windows of an airstream trailer my mother was kind enough to let me park beside our house.

And it was somewhere in this situation of flyby nights and long mornings, nearly lost legends and hard looks in the mirror, that I was born.

Discovering that to sing
is to exist.