1. |
Even Its Lies
02:45
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Even Its Lies: Centre Street, Red Hook
Jimmy working a rake
on the narrow, weedy strip,
piles dry leaves,
strays of chicken bone & candy wrapper
flush against rolling iron gate,
bags them all up,
& shortly tucks into his fun
boot-crushing used needles
he kicks the bits of
into a side street’s tiny
state of grace
his vigilance
and his holstered .38
forget;
surveying a sky and a road leading up to the sun
backlighting the appearance of a morning’s
drifty though usual cast of players--
some baggy-drawer’d kids off to school,
a passing, working ass or two--- his head
nearly lost
within reveries of earthly, remote bodies
realized
of a morning,
of a mood,
when his heart (even its lies)
still beats to god-fearing rarity &
elegance.
Without a word,
night is over.
Because he says so.
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2. |
Cha Cha Cha
04:05
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Cha Cha Cha
Swimming among all this tract of blue
nodding up to the sky,
it hits me: the coloring pens
I recall using for this very
scene. There’s premonition unfolding in it
until the moment is just here at last,
a talismanic blue buckling around a body
of memory as it wades refracted into me,
another stone, another sunken ship sea ghosts
deploy in bright, warping tremors.
Desire is much more enduring than patience.
Sunlight hits
this water waiting in the sea,
the one water I kept
in a coloring book years ago,
erecting the seconds in pen-strokes
and swabs.
Underwater is the place to be, this flashing
point where a sun and a boy
collide and color in the sea.
It is like stardust down here,
or, if not stellar, it’s the substance
of an asterisk my arms and legs
invoke with every stroke.
Leaving the room, I looked back.
All the memories, they all say I looked back.
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3. |
Furthermore
03:03
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Furthermore
Then she starts talking about repairs, improvements,
all the extra wood and copper piping we have laying around,
all the shelving, she says, shelves! Like, we can make so many shelves, she says,
and her mother comes through, my mother comes through, and hearing any mother is an ear in transcendence, mothers queuing up ancestrally, our mothers’ husbands’ mothers and their mothers, a throng of mothers’ voices speaking from a pressing continuum lowering the skies and the air, the ages, into my ear
before the toast pops up and I’m no longer quite hungry, no
thank you, and I sip my coffee, she sips her tea, and I take a drag
of my cigarette and stand up mum, resisting my loose lips and instead
exhale another small drainage of years and promises and letters and phone calls
like smoke from a great pale of embers, rising,
and bump my head on the overhead
light.
“Did you hear me?”
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4. |
Squint
04:30
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Squint: the Correspondent in Absentia
But if it still serves, and for the record,
consider its effects: the Polaroid achieves shapes first,
then gets on with the dreamy particulars:
long, small sets of breaking waves; low tide’s
pungent, shore-strewn foam;
a white stone lighthouse appearing
and appearing a little more
through the yellow windblown flaps.
Out here,
yellow matters. It is one half of brown
and you are green, and that makes brown, which rhymes
with the year a president’s voice on the radio always offers
a fondness for a makeshift tent
and squalor.
Once, after a reception fit only
for braggarts and the future’s best
and brightest, and after you pissed
on the club’s soundboard in reaction
to a questionable case of low flirtation,
you received a box in the mail, opened it,
and erupting in one ornamental word on a
hot pink flashcard:
Tact.
And one more, not ornamental, on the back:
(Repeat)
Only after sitting up
do you remember “out here”
is not desert at all,
and speaking is useless when you can just
shut up and rub her feet,
churning out silence the more skin
is absorbed into skin.
You arrived lily-white, smitten with yourself,
a muttering, pre-packaged humor subject to a keen
test of performance and guile. Fail, and it’s back
to a life of air and rail terminals (away forever, really),
and your lacunae of calendar dates
entombed in a spiritless Polaroid.
Your dispatch:
beacon against a white-hot sky
overlooking a gem-blue sea
war going on everywhere
Repeat.
You are proverbial,
one day leads into the next day—blah blah.
You are not the lone, pensive beachcomber,
just the lone beachcomber in a shattering
and reforming occupation of breezes the terrain,
come dusk,
stops accepting by fire light.
Nights grow full and the lighthouse lows,
its beam in dutiful rotation, trying to tell a war
from a stupor by the sea.
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5. |
Goon Seat
04:10
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Goon Seat
Your suspicions quiet down, your body hair quiets down.
But you still can’t explain whether it’s her or you
you’ve come here to embrace, feeling strangely winged
in this big and dark and now nearly empty room,
grateful the disunity she doesn’t bother to tell you about today
is now just a silent act of pulling open your jacket,
placing her ear at your chest and
breathing around vowels,
until the tears’ old and future reasons
drop like opposing hands in the dark
--where tears want you anyway: mule-kicked awake,
really awake,
the surprised face of presence and saga you’re never
quite ready for staring back from a reflective March
sky you’re probing for a courage unnoticed
by any season in a railroad apartment,
flipping lights on and on, borne out like an untouched,
fly-circled bowl of fruit cocktail
left too long in the sun but still colorful enough
to remain in this potboiler’s mise en scene.
Pan back: the pigeons have returned and are lifting from the rooftops,
spiraling up and up against the hazy skyline, dappling
brown to white, a kind of vengeance and testament hurling
out of the flaps of wing.
You’re winged, remember? Stop talking to yourself
and put your face where the one rogue pigeon has gone, breaking
off from the flock, tasting something rarified in all directions, all reviews,
until it comes back. That bird always comes back.
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6. |
Bill, In Consideration
02:16
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Bill, in Consideration
He’s breezy at the hinges, Bill
dual parts windrow and dinner theater villain stalking gooks along the near wall
soft-shoe footwork like the shaky grace
of punched-out middleweights moving through trouble and only finding
more
--those moves
chronically short of leaving Nam
behind “for real, bro,” harboring who-knows-what-foolishness in prizes under that natty saw tooth most likely plucked from behind Wardrobe’s back during tonight’s Nash Bridges
shoot two blocks down.
But the Homburg--- wow.
The Homburg, cocked and
jaunty as a French locution
stinks, and such power in stink
defies him,
penetrating lines three-deep at the bar
where Bill, in consideration, comes
blunt & clear of his previous figments
under a pink neon martini glass, sickly
and sweating purveyor of another old, old night’s
farce in early morning’s glare
like he’s popped up on a corner somewhere, maligned but going, enduring, a perennial shred of natal promise, Bill, just
never quite
whole Bill
yet.
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7. |
In McCullin's Photograph
03:57
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In McCullin’s Photograph
There’s a moot business to misery.
We pick up the sullen, weak, or deprived body of a child
and we move by some arcane duty to act,
abiding hell on earth as any other inconvenience.
We cannot fear. There’s no effort in fear. Fear comes, yes,
it has to. But we condone it. We have to.
We let grief, under a force of its own profound, unnameable commitment, slip away to our beds where it will pounce at last,
a heavy and hulking presence on our chests we learn to beat down
to a pulpy solace and intellect and then drink deeply of it,
picking up the body of the dying child, the corpse, even
the dead dog, tending to their miraculously fractal effects despite the wars and bombs and distortions of annihilated cities. The business has always been here, in any millennia, in any country, enforcing the skipped meal, adjudicating the dust, heaping one task onto another
so that our forbearing, micro-charged bodies push one century
to the next century, shunting McCullin’s photograph
to another mere image. We are surprising no one.
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8. |
Broke
02:48
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Broke
Not dithering,
or the imbecilic waiting on luck.
A well-kept ardor ensues,
convalescing mercy back to the simple,
privileged source
of seeing trees turn once more to age—
how the colors alone might be one brittle nerve
lost among leaves the evening’s crispy hues
cool around, like the stars’ one last struggle arrives
at the buildings and the docks.
Not worry, either,
over dinner’s somewhat pained
and brisk meditations between bites,
between every deflating assurance of
It gets better.
If it’s surrender you’re after,
look for it under a submission of eggs and toast,
your dinner of souls and ritual searching through
every room for a sentient pulse
to feed on and terminate;
to let your hands go slack
and fold up into the slow
and solemn rotations hands
can lose control of, under water,
at play among each loosening compass point
the memory of the rapt little boy at a kitchen sink
steals from money.
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9. |
Zones
11:17
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Zones
The streets are empty as night arrives, as night arrives baring
back against the occasional glaze & yaw of a cop car’s lights, the cunning lights
baring back the room & the walls.
We’ve been broken down into zones, down well
into zones & walls, warned to stay inside, inside, waiting to see
what the river’s walls, waiting, might do, or what the river does,
waiting, too. Quiet, slinking in on some deft immemorial toe, is beaten back,
arrives & is beaten back, crushed under a crucible of phone calls,
a crucible everyone speaks the same forlorn language from
& then tires of, cycling back to the giddy throes
the storm’s advance rattles deep & deepfully into trees.
And the seekers outside with their ominous anticipations--
they look like hooded Ancients, like hooded Ancients intuiting signs
& some hallowed meaning in the signs ascribed to the gloom,
squinting upwards into the fine, fine-needled rain flanking
the seekers, their lefts and rights flanked, the rain enfilading
the next corner, the next stubborn, open bar the seekers enfiladed
already, tipping back shots and bearing teeth like walls of a wet White Whale’s cheeky grin up to the gloom.
And still baring back against the occasional glazed-&-glacial lights of a cop car,
the emptiness of zones & walls troubles the windows, the windows staring back at the air, and the air knows itself to be scuttling old claws left too long in the rain, in the rain, scuttling old claws clamoring in the rain for our curiosity and grudges, old, rime-y
claws riding one city’s one long, dull wave between the wall
& mattress for days gone on, for days gone tumbling for days
on end for one city gone
missing.
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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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