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For Jack: A Philippic

from Output Negative Space by Enablers

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lyrics

For Jack: A Philippic

So maybe it is your turning 40, Jack, that ramshackle Coolsville floating
across your scowl as the sign in this bar blinks a demanding, red SIN.
All the boys and girls are diamonds at the rounds of their tables,
mewling under the jazzscape like intellectual pedants at some Parisian feed circa the Lost Generation, but we both know the risk factor in here
is lacking brass.The foreheads are tales manqué, and just too smooth for a surrealist trapped here in the Mission night's grabass élan.
It’s a veritable Cupid’s Last Rites when you’re thinking, 'how her hair fucks when she walks,' the curls buoyed on each elaborate placement of the heel.
Is she Gene Tierney in Laura?
Or is she just another wank coming to a slow boil on the can’s back burner?

I can only wonder what that off-shoot glance entails.
A handsome though churlish grin becomes a tintype of poise and intimacy,
your lone countenance thrust out from the pleasing lacquer of dimmed sconces
--- no, check that.
Not thrust out but blazing through this fleshbath like a lodestar,
your near-avuncular status pitying this middleclass assembly of shoegazers and morose frauds. Because you were jonesin’ long before they ever took the so-called pipe of the quarter century mark.
You suffered through long and dreary New Hampshire winters
hopped up on cocktails that would have a pharmacist scratching his head.
Christ, even you didn’t know after a spell, but that was the whole damned point: departure…zeal…a fuck-off con brio.

You suffered further still through staid New England airs,
the cabinetmaker’s son gone awry, the guy who fled Central Casting and landed in Clorox HQ’s, dried out fifteen years but still awash in the proverbial fists of your own mania.
But these bushleaguers aren’t concerned --- it’s fickle pussy they’re after
and who can blame them?
Your own renewed curiosity agrees with the Catholic schoolgirl, Jack,
though your eyes and innards speak elsewhere: in fractured spells
of looms and darts stitching the crooked wrinkled sheets as the breathing coalesces with the scent of right after. That cigarette of yours mistakenly takes on a curious charm, its taste subsumedand full
--- and it ain’t an after-meal one, either, boy, because when the pecking order has morphed from the assorted glyphs of old girlfriends’ faces to that dead air beside you?

There are no longer any Valentino’s, sir.

credits

from Output Negative Space, released May 5, 2006
Joe Byrnes: drums, Joe Goldring: guitar+ Hammond, Pete Simonelli: vocal, Kevin Thomson: guitar

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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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