“Too different” started out as a song lyric that I rediscovered. It was originally from the time of “Punk”-Poem No.3 from BE.aGaIN and an adapted chorus snippet became this stand alone piece.
The twenty year old plus original had verses such as “We sit and not talk, throwing knives from our eyes, but the thing that truly hurt were all those lies”.It continued in the same vein with ” Your eyes are so blue, you made my red” etc. It was clear this was a couple at home or in a therapist’s office-not talking.
To be honest-It was “not cool” and never found it’s way to a guitar or a piano and was hardly the thing that some teenagers on a mission would have any knowledge or experience of or any conviction to perform about, so it was a bit cliché and contrived and ultimately shelved before being presented as an offering.
The chorus however was “cool” and this is what remained on the pages of BE.aGaIN-distilled and direct and full of division and dissonance that reconciles itself in the last line with a universal truth.It also worked best on a page rather than on a punkish pulpit of a stage.
I had always loved to play with words that sounded the same but were written differently and therefore had differently assigned meaning -“two” ,”to” and “too” were great examples. There is a childlike confusion to how something that sounds the same can be written and become something else to a reader rather than a listener.
“Trains” and “stations” and “destinations” sounded a lot more interesting than the human ships in relation-ships that now passed in the night in the verses.
“Patients” on couches with different “sensations” on different “couches” also gave relatability but difference.Everyone has a cross to bear but it may be on a very different hill.
A late edit changed “symptoms” to “systems”. The brains electric highways or the human nervous system replacing something I thought that might be misconstrued- if you are in therapy that you are sick -nope, you’re just human.
The last line finishes with the title and try to illustrate that we should not be indifferent to our differences.
Humanity very much is not one in it’s sum , but in it’s parts-the same.
Algo.
Algo Poetry-Behind the Lines 