Quick update before I bug out. ( I know I said I didn’t want to post daily trivia, but different people asked for different pieces of this info so this is an easy way to get it out.)

The new drug seems to have had some effect. I went to sleep quickly, although I woke up an hour later and took Ambien so it’s hard to tell. Will try to go without Ambien tonight in FL. Hope it works, as Ambien gives me a hangover. Phttttt.

My phone is intermittently fucked, so if you call and I don’t answer, that’s why.

Bobby Gibbs is the feature at GotPoetry tonight…John Powers will be hosting. GO!

Will be in Orlando tonight but no time to be social (sorry guys). Back home tomorrow night, then more work in Hartford on Friday. Yay!

C-YA.

I just started taking a new medication for insomnia. It’s called Rozarem, and it’s supposed to work by regulating sleep cycles as opposed to working as a sedative.

It’s supposed to take 3-5 days to begin working. It’s definitely not working tonight.

So I just took an Ambien to knock myself down for the evening.

Before drifting off, I think I’ll hit the guitar briefly. I’ve hung the big blonde dreadnought on the wall above the bed for easy access and it’s made me play more often. I’m working on playing much more extensively up the neck in second and third positions and also working on alternate voicings for various chords. It’s making a difference — so many ideas for songs in my head, and I find myself humming tunes during the day that aren’t tunes from existing songs on the radio or anything. Trying to replicate those songs has been a source of short term frustration and longer term satisfaction.

Interesting — lyrics, which you’d think I’d have an easy time with, aren’t coming as quickly. Almost as if I’m so tied to the free-verse and customized forms I use in my poetry that I can’t switch up to more rigid lyrical forms (I know I don’t have to restrict myself to those forms in songs, of course, but I want to at least try as an exercise). I also don’t want to set any of the existing poems to music. Creating backups and tunes with Faro is one thing; I find I’m very reluctant to do it myself, although I have written a couple of Garageband electronic backing tracks I may use sometime.

Off to play. Tomorrow I fly to Orlando for a job, back on Wednesday night — no time to socialize this trip.

Can one of you folks who has a Myspace and hasn’t friended me yet please make a request? I think I’m having problems with notifications and such.

TIA

Someone want to tell me how Britney Spears flashing her hoo-ha at a party gets a higher mention on the Google News page than the crowds protesting Sean Bell’s shooting, which was relegated to the lowest “More Top Stories” section?

No, wait. Don’t bother.

For years, I’ve been somewhat skittish about the idea of combining music and poetry. I’ve always thought of poetry as containing its own music, and saw additions as unnecessary bells and whistles.

The project with Faro has changed my mind somewhat. I’m not only hearing my older poems set to music, but I’m hearing music in my newer poems — not necessarily hearing music behind them all, but definitely noticing a more musical influence on the way I stitch sounds together, rhythms, etc.

All this also means that I may make it to the Lizard Lounge soon — finally. I’ve always held out against it because I did not want to perform with the Trio. I’m less concerned about that now, and actually think it might be fun.

There’s also a guy in town — Bob Jordan — who’s been bugging me for years about doing a CD with me. Bob used to work with Eugene Chadbourne playing guitar and doing tape effects on some of his tours. I like what he does, but never took the idea of the project all that seriously. I may revisit this soon.

It’s good to take a road less travelled — especially for someone as old and snobby and set in my ways as I am. While I try to take risks in what I do and vary my style as much as is needed for the poem in question, I also recognize the limits inherent in my approach, and I haven’t been as comfortable lately in what I’ve been writing. There’s always the voice in my head saying “been there, done that — or if you haven’t, someone’s done it better.” I need to break my patterns. This is helping.

they are slaughtering them
5,000 there
22,000 there
238,000 there
slaughtering them

whole families depend on them
they must be slaughtered

they live in low places
they live in dirt
eat there
rest there
breed and shit there
they will be slaughtered

if one has it
all must
it’s viral and impossible to see
without knowing what to look for
slaughter them and save so many

no names
they are commodities
to be spent
these are the ones who will be slaughtered

they do not cry
as far as is known
they were bred for this

250,000 there
5,000 there
and there the toll is not yet counted
they must be slaughtered
for peace of mind here
for assuage of fear
for the safety of those who do not live
there

I found myself
sinking into my mattress
last night. This was not the weight
of my body sinking in.
The molecules and atoms had found
a way to interweave with each other
and I was settling into the mattress
as if it were a bath of milk. I felt
good, almost terrific, figuring the descent
would end at the denser bedframe, but
that did not happen. Instead I continued
to drop down through the bed, through
the floor, down into the downstairs apartment
(into a storage room, nothing there
but old boxes and such I slid right through)
and on into the basement
and the earth. I moved intact through
dirt and stone, imagining the heat of the core
below me, waiting for me, but soon enough
I stopped and found I could breathe and
once I had stopped I realized that I was
newly impossible. What can I say, I thought,
how can I explain to people how I came to be here,
somewhere below the basement floor? Why
do things like this happen? Maybe somewhere
there’s a timeline for miracles and oddities.
Perhaps they happen on some cycle and this
Saturday night in November was the allotted
time and place for this, and I was just
the one who happened to be here. Maybe Jesus
rose from the tomb this way. Maybe Oswald’s
magic bullet spun because it was there at the right time.
And maybe this was why after a time I began to rise
back through all I’d passed through before.
The particles in dirt and cement and wooden floor
grew warm as I ascended. My body
glowed like a torch until I returned to my bed.
I couldn’t sleep. I got up and wrote this out
with the letters as dense as could be on the page
so that I could not sink into it, even though the keys
of the laptop felt soft and I expected at any moment
that my fingers would poke through them.

Until now when I have lived my life I have expected to be its master.
What will happen if one day I am not, if I blend into the world
the way I blended into my bed? Will there be
anything left of me if I allow myself to breathe
from inside the things and places I see?
What will become of love if I cannot tell what loves
and what is beloved? Somewhere among the neutrons,
quarks, and muons, answers are waiting. I will find a way
to sink into them:
staring at the ceiling,
letting go when the miracle is ready for me.

Gooseneck lamp
and votive candle lit
here in my room,
bathroom light shining from
the house next door,
no sliver of dawn showing
but it’s still morning
on my skin, the cold
new day here if not yet
obvious to all.

In a moment
I’ll put out my lights
and close the shades
against the ones I can’t extinguish.
I’ll sleep a while longer until the full day
breaks through
and nudges me back awake.

Ask me what I’m thankful for
and I’ll tell you that there
is light you cannot avoid seeing
and light you can control. I am thankful
for the switch, I am grateful
for the finger that allows me to throw it, but
I am most grateful for the way light comes in
anyway, regardless of my choice.

today was long and emotionally draining. however, it’s over now, and I feel better all the time.

Happy happy for those of you who do celebrate — gratitude’s gratitude after all, in spite of what the day symbolizes to so many — and we’ll see you somewhere on the other side.

dusk spirit, reincarnation
of first revolver, blued skin,
yellow scent of sulfur;

dusk ghost, revenant
knife, bone hilted, satin
sheen of used steel;

dusk moth, noose reviving
early but just in time, hairy
hemp burning into hide;

dusk bear, returned pills in a jar,
old whiskey on a bedside stand,
growling in preparation;

dusk man, dusky woman,
twilight of humor, a hand
dealt with bad faith;

all creatures of dusk
in their habitats, allotted
a space in which to wait;

sunset bringing options,
pain, surcease of pain,
upset carts, spilled fruit;

dimming birds not singing
because sound tastes bitter,
not flying for want of air;

then —

dusk star,
shard, burn hole,
heat announcing itself;

dusk walk, rising from hard ground,
just enough to make legs move,
head for home moved enough to move;

dusk, no more than day in night, it’s
all in how it settles — blanket or shroud
in wearer’s eye alone. choose. pick one.

get up and walk away
or walk towards a new thing. get up.
dusk lasts no longer than it must.

that I’ve broken down and created a Myspace for publicizing my work.

A very few of you know that I had another Myspace at one time that was strictly personal, and was deliberately not known to the poetry community. I was going through a bad time and felt like I needed a place to hide from everyone.

I don’t like Myspace. I think it’s kinda crude and I hate working with it. But I have to acknowledge that it works for performing artists, so I’ve put one up.

Right now, there’s only bare bones info up, one poem, and no recordings. They’re coming. I’ll also go back and put in more shows and more details. I just wanted to get the ball rolling while I still had the will.

Anyway…here it is:

http://www.myspace.com/poetrybytonybrown

Don’t hate me because I’m a hypocrite.

dusk spirit, reincarnation
of first revolver, blued skin,
yellow scent of sulfur;

dusk ghost, revenant
knife, bone hilted, satin
sheen of used steel;

dusk moth, noose reviving
early but just in time, hairy
hemp burning into hide;

dusk bear, returned pills in a jar,
old whiskey on a bedside stand,
growling in preparation;

dusk man, dusky woman,
twilight of humor, a hand
dealt with bad faith;

all creatures of dusk
in their habitats, allotted
a space in which to wait;

sunset bringing options,
pain, surcease of pain,
upset carts, spilled fruit;

dimming birds not singing
because sound tastes bitter,
not flying for want of air;

night superfluous, sunrise
a joke, dusk alone
real and present;

break down,
let it go,
slip away.

I said something from the stage at the Hut tonight regarding the use of the phrase/image “bent over/fucked up the ass/getting the shaft” to illustrate something awful, like being at the mercy of the government or corporations. It’s almost always a guy who says it. It showed up a couple of times tonight in the open.

I suggested that the guys who used it might be a tad homophobic.

There was scattered applause, but applause wasn’t what I was looking for — I was more interested in getting people to see the potency and the ideas underlying a lot of slang. But I wonder, am I overreacting? Is noticing the source of an idiom unimportant?

In a conversation afterward, I voiced my similar feelings about referring to someone, male or female, as “my/your/his/her/their bitch,” with all its suggestions of subservience and submission.

Am I overanalyzing?

I don’t think of this as political correctness — I hate that phrase since it implies insincerity to me — but as making poets aware of the hidden spells and conjurings beneath our simplest language. I have no objections with someone who wants to say these things; I have strong objections with poems where things are said without regard to what they mean at all operative levels.

We get to do magic as poets. Magic requires understanding and intent at the very least.

I feel, sometimes, like I’m too rigid about these things…that I expect too much of those who purport to use language as art. But I guess my feeling is that if I can take the time to think about these things, anyone can. ANYONE.

People put too much reliance on talent and free expression as the building blocks of a poet’s craft. They forget that the words — how they mean, what they mean, why they mean what they mean — are fundamental, and if you use them, you ought to know how they work at al those levels.

My head hurts. This is why I think so often about stepping away from the poetry scene, I think…my own fucking standards are getting in the way of my ability to link with people. I hate that. I want to weep often. I want to close my eyes and not look outward.

currently watching the last race of the NASCAR season, where the championship will be decided.

Although it’s almost a foregone conclusion that Jimmie Johnson will win it all, it’s still a good race. I’m just pissed that the Nextel Cup points scheme is going to take my favorite driver, Kasey Kahne, out of contention for the Cup, despite his season-leading six wins.

I haven’t followed a sport this closely in years, and it’s nice to be involved in it — a welcome escape from things. I used to make fun of folks who were passionate about sports to the point of knowing all the stats, etc., but I get it now. I’m not an expert by any means, of course, but I’m enjoying it enough to think I will be one someday,

What night is Whoopiecat’s slam in Dallas?

I’ll be in Grapevine, TX from afternoon on the 5th to the afternoon of the 7th, with my nights free, and I’ll have a car. Working early on the 6th and 7th so no heavy nights can happen, but if I can make the slam, I’d like to.

ETA: Got it. Wednesday night the 6th. Corbet’s featuring. I’ll be there.