You know that giddy, butterfly feeling when everything is going well – the sun is shining and the weather is warming up, or perhaps the trees have blossomed or the potential that the boy you’ve been eying is flirting back, or you’ve just received affirmation from people you respect and admire and love that they respect and admire and love you back. That feeling. That’s what I’m feeling tonight because of an incredible concert with Vienna Teng. Not only was it a solo performance and she the main act, but she played for two hours, then signed autographs and posed graciously for photos, and then, then, invited the remaining audience to sit on the stage around her piano while she serenaded us for another 45 minutes. I had almost prime seating, right across from her piano – but directly facing the stage lights, so all of my pictures have halos and spots. But, oh, oh, to get to see her play and hear her sing and talk to her: bliss.

So the poem today is actually one of my favorite songs of hers, one that she performed tonight. I think it reads well as poetry as well (although punctuation is off…).

Kansas by Vienna Teng

Sun sets in an ocean of brown farmland haze
Power lines draped across roads you could drive on for days
Well it’s all too perfect
Time to look back at us now

Endless and empty like Kansas
Our cities of clouds
Flat on the table like Kansas

I lay down in sheets suddenly worn threadbare
Every wall I lean on transforms to sliding doors and thin air
Well I hope yours is kinder
Let go of this when you find her

Bury this hard
Down underneath your white canvas
Our houses of cards
Flat on the table like Kansas

It’s not regret
Just an unexpected accounting of debts
Only now called
No it’s not regret
Just remembrance is all
Of how close we had come
The war almost won
But I sent up our flag and moved on

You and I
Lost to the winter like Kansas
And all my goodbyes
Flat on the table like Kansas