Oedipus, or They Who Dared

So way back in 2009, the summer before I went back to Michigan State, I was hanging out with a group of friends I met through one of my best friend’s local cannabis-guys, along with my friend and fellow cashier at a grocery store in our hometown. She has a lush, vibrant voice. It’s deep and soulful. It captivates and transports you, even against your will. Anyway, she floated that she wanted to finish writing a song since we were with my musical-bachelor friends (bachelors at the time at least), late 20-somethings with guitars. She sang the first verse and a chorus she’d worked up, but then wanted a second verse. I have no recollection of what her lyrics were, only the haunting beauty of her voice, the ache and longing her words and voice provoked in me, and the feeling that I needed her to keep singing forever. She prompted this out of me, and I was lost to the world for the next 15-20 minutes as I typed out these lines into my phone. It didn’t amount to a second verse for my friend with the lush voice, but all the same, I walked away with one of the better examples of my earlier, distinctly surreal, poetic voice and style.

Oedipus, Or They Who Dared
Lucca Daniel Green
17 August 2009


	Would that the great earth
	still spun through your eye

	Look through me
	this hide and seek
	through the rosary
	See the light behind
	my alternating eye

	Breathe the breath I long to breathe
	Next to me, tempt
	tug and tease
	
	Hang me from your sky
	Beneath my darkness rise
	Birth, breath, hidden rhyme
	cover me in your lime brace

	Speak, my heart, spill
	your unknown truth
	your pulse
	your life

	The gash, the wound, the end

	Beat
	Again

	Rise and fall
	See and know
	
	The lone tear
	on mahogany and grain
	The widow who waits
	no more, no more

	The truth now known
	Thus the great earth spun
	though god hid from shame
	Oedipus rewound, redone

	Should you see through me
	what would you uncover
	Love in chaos, riot in balance
	Oh! Those holiest of ironies
	bled through me
	bled from me

	For you and them
	for fire and order
	brilliant the light
	shone that night
	Brilliant the dark
	hiding beneath all