Echoes

There is an album you play and it makes you a kinetic mess.  Your neck moves, your face tics, and your index finger points to that one cymbal crash in the left speaker.  You've heard it a million times, it's the table of contents, predictable and reliable.  It's dog-earred.  It's the best dish at your favorite restaurant. 

There is an album you play and it's sleep paralysis.  A face you can still see clearly, her voice in a long concrete pipe.  The woman, the harvest moon, the chord change is the smell of her hair in summer.  You've heard it a million times, you never expected the plot change when the first song began.  Low fire burns down to embers.

I can lean my head back and adjust the headphones.  Sometimes I see the ceiling as a movie screen, sometimes a canvas I'm painting, sometimes the ceiling is just white.  The run out grooves make me stand up.  I have to flip sides.