1. |
Phone Blows Up
03:08
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Sides lose.
Betting sides, intuitive sides.
Marriages end, elections are lost.
Everyone in this equatorial world
one day wakes up holding themselves,
losers.
The sun slowly mounts the morning sky
lighting up the doorway you’ll walk through
for coffee and a cigarette in the kitchen
where, sequestered late with Carsten the night before,
talk turned on the changing grace of bars, neighborhoods,
how all our youthful indulgences & stardom tap out.
Decadence is staying drunk well into your forties,
up late most nights, “sitting bullshitting” in a dim kitchen
and feeling thrown away by everything you should have
known twenty years before. You can’t despise the sun
when its light culminates in windblown autumn leaves
and is swallowed whole like a ghost in clouds.
It’s only reminding you to go back to Reichenbergerstr
to re-light the candle in the kitchen: sometimes sides don’t lose, they collapse,
and you can’t tell the difference between the two anymore.
You know how the keenest people around
know when to shut up and don’t have to go out of their way
to prove anything?
Perhaps this is what empathy truly is.
There’s no urgency in much of your life, especially in writing.
You can do it anywhere, which is no ultimate guarantee for “good” or even “great” work. Balance purpose with action? It’s a living.
You don’t care for overly ambitious people who are always competing.
But this makes you feel urgent.
Competitive, overly ambitious people comprise too many
telegenic assholes walking the earth,
and people like you give them an advantage; they tend to
win over crowds and sunder the already weak or careless
with something that irreconcilably rhymes
with orange.
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2. |
Beam
03:34
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Lift the pencil again, Bibi.
Poised this way over the drawing
your left eyebrow
arches quickly, just for amusement
then relaxes; your camel lashes
blink once, so slowly the movement should be
scored like a beam searching out
an evasive figure beneath
a dark eastern sky.
I’d swear that I could get away from you
but all gospels of evasion
lead back to this table
in this beam--
the yellow hue you put to paper
is a settling of divinations over our bowed heads.
Maybe you’re thinking if pencil
hadn’t been put to paper again,
had stayed withdrawn,
would Deliciosa
bow as dutifully
or blush under your concern?
“She needs something,” you say.
“The cat’s still in the bag.”
But even as you continue to draw her—
flesh, color, resonance-- interstitial finger raised,
I’m still trying to see you into existence too.
Looking behind comprehension, I see the moment
I saw your gift, the snakeskin dangling out of the bore
of a tree, which I doubted until I walked up to it.
I doubted everything.
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3. |
The Stink Of Purity
03:54
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No one’s ever quite sure what idols are up to
or how the idols are abused for the sake
of history’s myopic revisions. In ceremonial congress,
love of self, love of country, Christian love, carnal love, compassionate love—never having done one or any of them enough, or professing them to the point of nullity where only solitude is left— even wild flowers
could be idols blooming outside the cemetery,
a congress of bees spreading life randomly
but also by design: there is an equally disabused
revision to this world, its methods and instruments are
wise and inhuman.
On Sunday mornings the winter parishioners
are on the march: ladies in furs and knee-high boots; sluggish men trekking behind and whispering in what can only be the solemn language of sport.
In ceremonial congress, they are like winter suns on cold pavement,
revealing the trash up and down the street under severe skies of blue. Suspicion is the daily theme. If they ever do chance a rare look,
their eyes are also severe and blue. Maybe suspicion is my daily theme. Maybe the sun isn’t an audacious up-down, up-down discovery.
And maybe love is bigger and always wins the long race against
its own violence and distortion.
But I still want to hit someone
and then kiss them on the lips,
not to say sorry
but I told you so.
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4. |
Suburban Death March
02:53
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That insistent, lone goose-honk
blaring across the complex--
In single-file the orderly students --
hands on shoulders
in forced march--
pass the weapon-at-arms soldier in
the parking lot’s
outer perimeter--the austere soldier
still as stone the students
sluice around like river current
then part from
in zany spokes, clothes
and hair ruffling under choppers’
blades
---the shooter is still loose.
This is not a drill.
They run over the lavish, green lawns
backpacks flopping, a blunt show of
bodies and terms--
like fresh refugees
are a blunt show
of bodies and terms—fear
under a maundering pump of
chopper blades.
No sluice now—dread, yes, but
a wondrous sight comes through
—white kids approaching
now splitting around a single Black student
strangely unalarmed
arms raised in mockery or in a rallying
cry the choppers’ blades syncopate: pumping
and pumping his arms
like to pump out of his skin
a past and future
whim,
in a manner of I am
pump
like I’m the only motherfucker
who knows
I am doom forestalled pump
He is
bowled around, no stone
but
chaos’s chosen brave child chaos
will use
to exalt itself
once more
on the dour
pumping of a neck.
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5. |
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My god, he says, Look out! Then he laughs:
the immensity of the setting’s getting to the story about
how his solar plexus reacts.
Laid out before him is “underway” (like color
doesn’t dry, in settles it), the whole scenery rising into memory
like bath water
slips up the body.
What matters now is how one portrays
the corruption.
Every wind-bustled feather of a falcon banking
along the western ridge of Dead Horse Point, every twig
in the trees along the lip of the canyon shining in the afternoon
and snapping him more awake in this grip of sight he’s now
glowing in like a dog
in all its middle-distant mining
of a bone’s center. The corruption’s there too,
in old, wedded voices that sharpen as they go up in higher
commanding registers that strip him from the feet up
after attributes of water and color are gone. He’s not
alone, and he’s not exactly by himself, but
there’s no longer any proper body to turn on
all that glow turned afterglow the laws
of revival will favor and build Halls for.
Look out indeed.
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6. |
Monkey To Man
03:13
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The piano player
is getting bitchy. First it’s: the fan not on; what, no one knows it’s summer? Then it’s: the cables tangled at his feet. Now it’s: the rain coming in and the peoples’ scattered umbrellas, the swishing and the dropping of them at the open door-- and they just leave them there, they just leave them there, looking like a gaggle of dead storks. Newcomers, bathroom seekers—they disquiet him. And what’s a piano for? Mood. And: More than just that. And not just: that, either.
It’s transformation he’s after, a perpetual altering-of.
Monkey to Man, anyone?
We can intuit vagaries of hotel lobbies & EST: the piano player who believes in war, hunched under his chicken-winged shoulders like an old, hungry and cold poet in his nightshirt, up in the candlelit attic, creating in spite of his airborne pissiness.
He’s trained in the knowledge that knowledge is to be latched into a hold, suspended, and dropped to kill on position. This is his silence, his thinnest skin, this is his silence.
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7. |
The Scythe
02:01
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On a bike ride yesterday
I fought against a strong gust
— slow work of it--
more like a churning heavy-sea chop
--- hardly a buoy
but a cork the wind was speaking for: Cork!
Cork! Cork!
steering my wheels
into rubble and dog shit and the occasional passing car’s
path.
All at once I no longer needed the anecdotal; I didn’t need
sea analogies, either
just the steady annunciation
in my landlubber ears—
wind of the world, world of wind,
blowing us all round
yet failing to cleanse.
I saw the wind like a scythe
sweeping over us all from one pole to the other--
one sally of it in the sun, the return in a harvest moon
not striking
but ever ready to and soon
its blade and its darling, the wind
swinging and swinging again
to a mottled tune
of siren and finch.
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8. |
Willard To Kurtz
09:17
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I don’t turn on a light till noon.
A storm’s come in from the south,
blowing the oregano down.
It’s dark inside and outside,
but it feels as warm and ironically pleasing
as her face in the morning
after sleeplessness and all the acceptance
of worry: it takes the esurience of eyelashes
to quell and break up tears, but it takes a mother’s love
to remain quiet.
My cigarettes get drenched in a few seconds if I
leave them on the sill. I dry them in the microwave.
The wind blows hard and directly against the window
like laughter looking in.
I eat blackberries. I eat yogurt and meats, greens
and grains, and drink much, much wine among friends
dead or imagined, in tribute to a bountiful luxury
of souls to throw my arms around and then ignore.
Still the wind blows hard,
predominating from one direction but blowing
eventualities in all other directions too difficult to trace.
Willard to Kurtz: I see
no
method,
sir….
I keep calling out to myself, returning to the rumble
of blood in my ears, the signaling voice Lorca
called the shipwrecked blood the sleepless hordes came
staggering through. That was 90 years ago. Today,
one of a crew of tree-cutters looks up at a BLM sign
in a window. Laughing, he says, “Got another camera on us, yo.”
And Angie, departed many weeks back-- I keep seeing the flowers we
tossed not landing on the passing hearse but blowing away
ecstatically, like the skies over Mumbai were ecstatic, like the waters
of Venice were clear.
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9. |
Year Of The Dog
03:59
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You’re doing it all over again, strangely and askance,
airport to train, train to bus to street and on up the flights of stairs to a door, thousands of miles covered in half a day. You dreamed
of a lone boat’s light on the sea, its comforting glow trolling glassy, still waters and: you woke up. You saw nothing, found nothing, felt aphasic even though the words—you knew—were passing just below that dreamboat. Now you’re here, red-eyed, zoomed in on without a gift or a true purpose. Already you’re wistful, pornographically so, the end words falling into place over a brink you’ve crossed many times only to chastise yourself and broaden your vocabulary. Some gift. But on you go repeating, repeating, repeating, big Petey, little Petey, irregular Petey. It’s January. We’re at the kitchen table. You already know how it all shakes out before the actual fight occurs over tacos and too many bottles of Pacifico: a thoughtless power of snow throwing up its jubilant arms over the windy streets, the same arms she will walk away through, walking as them, avoided and avoiding, as she goes up the street and into the air, burdens of arms, arms, arms, without a room or consideration. Her line of escape is sealed, and she looks back just one time before the disintegration. You’re not there either, checking the mail.
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Enablers
Band Members: Joe Goldring (former Swans, Toiling Midgets, Touched by a Janitor) on guitar; Kevin Robert Thomson (former Nice Strong Arm, Timco, Touched by a Janitor, now Hazel Atlas) also on guitar; poet, writer, and narrator Pete Simonelli on vocals. Rounding out the line-up is drummer Sam Ospovat (Ava Mendoza, Brendan Seabrook, tUnE-yArDs, William Winant). ... more
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