1. |
Unreason
05:23
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I see today that everyone on earth wants the answer to the same question but none has the language to ask it. The inconceivable is clearly the inconceivable. Bum mutter, teethchatter, brain flotsam, we float up from our own depths to the sky not the heavens, an invention of the murderers. Dogs know the answer by never asking the question but can’t advise us. Here is the brain that outran the finish line: on a dark day when the world was slate the yellow sun blasted the mountain across the river so that it flung its granitic light in the four directions to which we must bow. Life doesn’t strangle on ironies, we made that part up. Close after dawn the sheep next door leave their compound, returning at twilight. With the rains this was a prodigious green year, and now the decay of autumn sleeps in dead comfort. Words are moving water — muddy, clear, or both.
To remember you’re alive visit the cemetery of your father at noon after you’ve made love and are still wrapped in a mammalian odor that you are forced to cherish. Under each stone is someone’s inevitable surprise, the unexpected death of their biology that struggled hard, as it must. Now to home without looking back, enough is enough. En route buy the best wine you can aff ord and a dozen stiff brooms. Have a few swallows then throw the furniture out the window and begin sweeping. Sweep until the walls are bare of paint and at your feet sweep until the floor disappears. Finish the wine in this field of air, return to the cemetery in evening and wind through the stones a slow dance of your name visible only to birds.
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2. |
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The scene changes
Five hours later and
I come into a room
where a clock ticks.
I find a pillow to
muffle the sounds I make.
I am engaged in taking away
from God his sound.
The pigeons somewhere
above me, the cough
a man makes down the hall,
the flap of wings
below me, the squeak
of sparrows in the alley.
The scratches I itch
on my scalp, the landing
of birds under the bay
window out my window.
All dull details
I can only describe to you,
but which are here and
I hear and shall never
give up again, shall carry
with me over the streets
of this seacoast city,
forever; oh clack your
metal wings, god, you are
mine now in the morning.
I have you by the ears
in the exhaust pipes of
a thousand cars gunning
their motors turning over
all over town.
God love you
Dana my lover
lost in the horde
on this Friday night,
500 men are moving up
& down from the bath
room to the bar.
Remove this desire
from the man I love.
Who has opened
the savagery
of the sea to me.
See to it that
his wants are filled
on California street
Bestow on him lar-
gesse that allows him
peace in his loins.
Leave him not
to the moths.
Make him out a lion
so that all who see him
hero worship his
thick chest as I did
moving my mouth
over his back bringing
our hearts to heights
I never hike over
anymore.
Let blond hair burn
on the back of his
neck, let no ache
screw his face
up in pain, his soul
is so hooked.
Not heroin.
Rather fix these
hundred men as his
lovers & lift him
with the enormous bale
of their desire.
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3. |
Skin
02:10
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Skin loosely wrapped around these appendages
comprising rough hands creased with bands
of memories half remembered half lived
as my past so often feels I've come this far
but I don't exactly remember how I got here at all
I've come this far but I don't remember how I got here
Eventually linearity will fold to eternity
I'd live forever with you, I'd live forever with you if I could
and as if you wouldn't mind
how much more than enough for both us darling,
and If I sing you are my voice
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4. |
Two Sonnets
03:02
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Happy the maimed, the halt, the mad, the blind--
All who, stamped separate by curtailing birth,
Owe no duty's allegiance to mankind
Nor stand a valuing in their scheme of worth!
But I, whom Fate, not Nature, did curtail,
By no exterior voidness being exempt,
Must bear accusing glances where I fail,
Fixed in the general orbit of contempt.
Fate, less than Nature in being kind to lacking,
Giving the ill, shows not as outer cause,
Making our mock-free will the mirror's backing
Which Fate's own acts as if in itself shows;
And men, like children, seeing the image there,
Take place for cause and make our will Fate bear.
Good. I have done. My heart weighs. I am sad.
The outer day, void statue of lit blue,
Is altogether outward, other, glad
At mere being not-I (so my aches construe).
I, that have failed in everything, bewail
Nothing this hour but that I have bewailed,
For in the general fate what is't to fail?
Why, fate being past for Fate, 'tis but to have failed.
Whatever hap-or stop, what matters it,
Sith to the mattering our will bringeth nought?
With the higher trifling let us world our wit,
Conscious that, if we do't, that was the lot
The regular stars bound us to, when they stood
Godfathers to our birth and to our blood
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5. |
Night
02:38
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If you find your true voice, bring it to the land of the dead. There is kindness in the ashes. And terror in non-identity. A little girl lost in a ruined house, this fortress of my poems.
I write with the blind malice of children pelting a madwoman, like a crow, with stones. No—I don’t write: I open a breach in the dusk so the dead can send messages through.
What is this job of writing? To steer by mirror-light in darkness. To imagine a place known only to me. To sing of distances, to hear the living notes of painted birds on Christmas trees.
My nakedness bathed you in light. You pressed against my body to drive away the great black frost of night.
My words demand the silence of a wasteland.
Some of them have hands that grip my heart the moment they’re written. Some words are doomed like lilacs in a storm. And some are like the precious dead—even if I still prefer to all of them the words for the doll of a sad little girl.
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6. |
To The Harbormaster
02:24
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I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught
in some moorings. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder
in my hand and the sun sinking. To
you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage
of my will. The terrible channels where
the wind drives me against the brown lips
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks, it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.
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Vera Cruise Minneapolis, Minnesota
I also make music at painritualmn.bandcamp.com
fuck fascism
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