KISS THE FROG (A Poem With Substance But Without Form / It Made Itself As It Went Along) "There is never any end. There are always new sounds to imagine, new feelings to get at. And always there is the need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds so that we can really see what we've discovered in its pure state. So that we can see more and more clearly what we are. In that way, we can give to those who listen the essence, the best of what we are. But to do that at each stage, we have to keep on cleaning the mirror." —John William Coltrane i am not certain what i am writing, where this task will take me, why and from whence the words stream forth, even what impels me to open my skin to the radiation from a computer screen--my style is such that i now reach for a keyboard before a pencil or pen, there is a sensation pleasingly tactile for me in tapping the keys, tactile in the same way i have heard others who don't like computers describe the manual motion of noting, the heft of the fountain pen, ink flowing, or the scrape of graphite as the pencil marks the page, you can actually hear the pencil point swoshing bumpily over the paper without benefit of the liquidity of ink to smooth its moving—but i write anyway because beyond the creativity, the profession, the hosannas i sometimes receive for something i've written, beyond the mundane, exploration itself is exciting, especially when i am exploring what is presumably the known yet is ever changing and never accurately charted, when i am uncovering the interior me. who—or should i say what writer, what serious artist?—does not know the self, has not examined closely, with or without aid of some kind of mirror, the mind being the chief reflector, but really candid talks with lovers, children, parents and lifelong friends giving a more true image, talks when words just tumble forth without the constraint of consideration weighing them, those freewheeling conversations where we actually say everything, withhold nothing, and leave with our mouths atingle, sort of like a sip of carbonated water rinsing away whatever taste was already there. what i'm saying is that—i mean what i'm writing, it's just that for me writing is a form of "saying," a textual sounding of what i feel or think or both—anyway, what i'm trying to get to is not only the old saw about the unexamined life not being worth living, i am going further, i am blowing trane's tune when trane spoke about keeping the mirror clean, that's what i want: unrelenting honesty with myself, the facing of all my foibles and fantasies, my accomplishments as well as my failures, especially my omissions when, for whatever reason, i lay back when i should have propelled myself forward. the exploration of the self is the intrepid journey, or at least one would like to think of oneself as being intrepid in investigating the self, but isn't it true that if there is one spirit we all fear it is the shadow self, that part of us which usually goes unexamined, the persona whose face we deign not kiss for fear our lips land on the warty countenance of the frog that croaks inside everyone of us, the frog, the secret-knowing, fly-eating, maladjusted, toad-ugly, anti-social night creature who resides at the bottom of our personality wells, splashes around in our deepest water and just waits, just waits... —kalamu ya salaam