Lane Eddington

Lane has been writing poetry since age 2 and is also a singer, songwriter, dancer and actress. She plays the piano and guitar and has recently completed a music video, titled "Tears of This Fire". A native of Chicago, she loves great food, great wine, the Art Institute, and music above all else. Favorite movies include "The Red Violin", "The Matrix", and "Ferris Beuler's Day Off."


Link to the page where you can see her music video: http://norwest.net/mvdown.html

Lane's email: goldenpoems@ameritech.net (Lane Eddington)

Why Must We

What does it mean when you see inside someone
Whom you’ve just met and shouldn’t be so vivid…

What is it when you react to their wavelength
And suddenly a string you didn’t know was attached to your instrument
Begins to vibrate…
With sound that won’t diminish but keeps climbing, materializing into
A startling note beyond what you knew could be played…

What does it mean when you can’t shake their presence,
Like water inside glass, that shouldn’t have gotten in but is trapped now,
Unable to expand?

What is it to want someone, Like a 110 year old man wants desperately to be born again…
What is it to be hungry for something your own mind lacks
What is it to be denied someone while being immersed in them

It is to own despair and cherish it,
Trying every moment for something that shouldn’t be possible – like turning your body inside out. It shouldn’t be possible to make your heart numb, to erase an emotion.

It doesn’t make sense that one should be hurt by awareness…

Why must people meet and pretend they don’t know each other already?
Why must people meet at all? It would seem somehow easier to float alone in one’s capsule of thought forever, like a seed from some tropical tree, suspended in the Arctic snow, so that maybe in some future enlightened generation, it will be cared for properly.

Why must souls collide in this minefield of previous unions?

Because once long ago we were all part of each other like drops of space, particles of intention--
You can’t cut an ocean in half, or a word, or a feeling
But why must I know you at all?

Because even now when you’re so dreadfully complacent I remember your rage exploding against armies of fire – intruders who tried to steal thought itself - in a time before time before life on the sitcom

Before we decided we weren’t a part of each other

Before, when I tried to kill you with my smile because (god forbid) it was fun to see your reaction to me trying to vanquish your all-consuming ignoring of me

and then I won because…
no wait

I lost.

I lost and I lose you again every day.

You must remember the time because I wouldn’t fight with you without prior cause
prior feeling
prior confusion…..
prior love.

What is it to feel someone’s weight in space
To know they are in the room, feel them like radio waves
Like wind through time which cannot
Die…
The sense one has which keeps one alive
It just is.

Like water – like ions – it’s hard to deny.

Like the beginning of everything in the universe that was created when I first blinked.
My right to love is my right to be.

And being, I love. And loving, I live.
But living without you is hardly living.

Love is the only real truth there is.

Lane Eddington July 12, 2003
revised July 27, 2003
___________________________-
Trying to Sleep poem

If my mind was a great papaya
I would scoop out all the seeds,
and be at peace.
If my head were a town,
I would evacuate the area,
close all the stores, and make it snow,
quietly.
If a mind could be written down,
I would hire a thousand typists
to put my thoughts in books
and ship them overseas,
where they would be translated
into Chinese.
Then I could never think those thoughts again,
because I could not read them.
So,
I would have to come up with new ones.
--Lane Eddington - August 4, 2003

__________________________________

The Handshake for the Drum

I learned to play guitar today
And a princess was photographed a week ago
Before she was given the option to live
And they’re trying to find the bodies of the American soldiers that had
names
While trying to forget the names of those they wish they hadn’t found
Another piece of meat to wet the grass, Sir, none of ours.
I know this because I just learned to read injustice
Interesting because it happened that I’d just begun to write about peace
They’re trying to blanket their young in Japan
Textbooks are but blank canvases, Mr. President
There’s this song about war by Joni Mitchell that I like
But there’s a drug on the market with a slogan that says "welcome back"
And it’s going to kill you if you don’t watch the fuck out
There was a four-car crash on one of the streets in Los Angeles a couple
days ago
Less than one percent of the smiles that occurred naturally in 1979 still
occur naturally
I learned to play guitar today.

Lane Eddington
August 31, 1997
______________________________

Birth

He came out of her
A thought banging into his mind
At the same moment as he was banging into his head.

The thought… What was the thought?
In a moment he couldn’t even remember,
Though there seemed yet an imprint of it still in his consciousness,
It had hit so hard.

What had he
Been contemplating
Before all of this started?

He heard the screams that came from his mouth
And took hold of his lungs
And tried to close his throat,
But in a moment he and the body began to merge,
To assume each other, become the
Composite they would be for the next 89 years.

And he was human, and he wanted to scream.
Just given a voice, who wouldn’t?

Holding now a soft gaze from a sweet young face,
Wrapped in a blanket,
A sensation he’d long missed, but not forgotten entirely,
overcame him.

A weight of years to come pressed into his awareness,
And in a minute there was nothing. Nothing but light—
The energy of infinite possibility.
What an awesome canvas, so big, so long…

Dreams take us where we cannot go.
Sometimes we know the things we couldn’t know.
They’re just as real as the sun at night—you can’t see it—

In his dreams he wondered where he came from.
Then one day he was four years old, and there were flowers outside.
He knelt down and the sun smiled knowingly.
It came to him with such an otherworldly feeling surrounding it…

He remembered
He’d been thinking,
"I hope they have sunflowers in their garden."

Lane Katherine Eddington
December 29, 1997

Copyright © 2003. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Duplication of this poetry without
permission of the author is forbidden under copyright law. Please ask
permission if you wish to use for non-commercial purposes.

Last updated: October 12, 2003