Daily Archives: November 24, 2013

The Bands We Hate

The condemnation
of a popular rock band
says more about
those who condemn it
than about the band itself.

For every one who
condemns the band,
there are ten who 
adore them

and none of the condemnation
ever does a thing for the world

except perhaps serve as
a shiny little token
of our deep need to hate
something, anything,

even when we are liberal enough
or smart enough
to show no hatred for those things
which would lead to our own 
condemnation,

though
on occasion
those things can be discerned 
through analysis
of the bands we say we hate…

says the man, once a viciously cool boy,
who only dimly got
the sulfurous truth that lay behind
his generation’s “Disco Sucks”
rage,

and the later one about 
“Rap’s Not Music,”

and about something brewing now
about old versus young,
about fun versus depth,
about slick versus raw,
about…
the very notion
of 
“versus”
itself.  

Every discussion
about the bands we hate
is in fact a discussion
about the fear
of losing primacy.


The Tangle

I don’t mind that this mind of mine
takes the word “mouse”
and transforms it to “rocket” or “dagger”
or “fishing shack,”

so that the sound of their vermin feet
in my walls becomes a space race,
a war, a life on the sea.  Hear mouse,
realize everything.  I’ve learned

to live with this.  I call it blessing
and not curse, though when I thought 
the word “blessing” at first I heard
“California redwoods” and then “magma,”

and “blessing” became a vision
of forests jumping into blaze along rivers
and roads of liquid fire.  Blessing is fire
here within me.

Everything’s always in the process
of being connected to all else.
Any one word leads to another
as fire leads to ash, as flash flood

leads to canyon, as mouse
leads to dagger rocket fishing shack
or blessing leads to volcano-sparked trees
lit like candles along the coast.  

Shh, says the Universe, by which I mean
the dying willow in the backyard.  Don’t spill
all the secrets of the tangle, little mouse;
there will be blessings upon you if you do.