i just finished a song. if i can get it recorded in the next few days and then figure out how to post the sound file, i shall.
Author Archives: Tony Brown
About Tony Brown
friday night, wood river cafe
the classic rock band
on stage is
making a raft
from old bones
and old couples
are climbing on,
bobbing on the floor
as they get their sea legs back
on friday night
at the wood river cafe.
it’s chain of fools
and summertime
and white room and
strange brew,
and everyone knows all the words
and half the room is cocked
and the other half is just behind them.
when the band takes a break
the smokers gather out back
and when the band comes back on
they don’t hurry in, they just
finish their smokes and hurl the butts into
the full sand bucket by the door.
now it’s eagles and byrds
and creedence and stevie ray
and everyone who wasn’t crocked before
is now,
and the good ship sails into the midnight hour
with a band who won’t quit their day jobs
but wish they could, and all the passengers
wanting anything but work,
and when the last chord plays everyone
goes home, thinking about
sunrise over the ocean, cheap guitars,
pretty men and women, sweat
on a drummer’s brow,
the way the room rocked and tumbled
for them, for them alone,
just the way it used to rock.
You have got to be fucking kidding me.
I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am:
Abortion, birth control foe to head federal office of family planning.
pale words
which words
left unused
will sprout mushrooms
and slime molds?
i can’t speak them
for fear of engaging
with the rotting
i used to know more words
for any thing on the planet
than anyone else
i used to be the tongue
and now i’m nothing
silent
afraid to speak
those words
that have been lying fallow
and are now sprouting white fronds
that would smell like death on my lips
i will bend over
for them someday
but today i am cold enough
my lips turning blue
cold enough
to be sure
that all they would do is chill me more
speaking the dead words
hearing them in my skull
shaking my jaw
i am unready
knowing i will have to speak them
eventually but today
i want to live without them
no grazing upon the white flesh today
no time allotted for them
although i gaze long and hard
at them
growing there
in a pile of waste
waiting
I wish I could feel like a beginner again on a regular basis.
I can’t recall the Original Joy of this work. I’ll catch glimpses when I try a new form, a new approach — but mostly, it’s like every line I write comes with its own voice saying “been there, done that.”
Someone once said that every poet really only writes one poem over and over. I don’t know if it’s entirely true for everyone, but I feel like it’s come true for me, and I’m starting to hate that poem.
Working on stuff like the Jim poems and now the Sondra series has helped, but I’m not sure what to do in addition to that, or about how to proceed once they are done. Setting the stuff to music has been wonderful, but even there I think I can only go so far.
I find myself reaching more and more for the guitar as a way to get it out there — to put stuff into words and music. Maybe that’s what’s next.
But I’m reaching an unthinkable point — the point where I may not see myself as a poet anymore. And for someone who’s identified that way since he was 14, for someone who’s made it such a central part of spirituality and being, that’s almost unbearable to contemplate.
This Just In!
OJ’s book is actually an attempt to smoke out the real killer.
The theory is, he’ll get upset at the inaccuracies in his book and write his own named “No, I DID IT!!!” Call me crazy, but it just might work.
Smaht thinkin’, eh?
Gotpoetry gig
A good night — decent crowd including a new reader. Ryk was an excellent host.
Faro and I did:
Getting Ahead (yes, it’s now set to music)
Jim’s Fall
Faro’s bass solo
Snakes on a Plane (which is once again a lot of fun to do — much better with music behind it)
That kinda completes our current bookings until the April tour…anyone want us? In the meantime, we’re planning on writing and recording some more.
More later.
Stone Soup Gig
Was not bad at all. Small crowd, average age 50+. Some very nice work in the open.
My set was NOT typical — I stuck close to newer stuff and some more obscure pieces:
Open Mouth
Song Of the Twirling Accountants
Robert Johnson
I Need A Guitar
Mythology for Cats
Name
Tenochtitlan
American History
What You Call It
Political Art
DIY
I skipped my usual cover, which was going to be Susan McMaster’s “Against The War,” in favor of “DIY” in order to pick up on something I sensed in the open — some sense of quests for identity from a couple of people. It seemed to fit. In addition, this was a pretty savvy crowd poetically — didn’t see the need to push the importance of reading other people’s poetry.
I also had “Elephant Teeth” cued up, but ran out of time. Bummer.
Tomorrow night — um, actually tonight — it’s Jim’s Fall again at Gotpoetry Live! We’ll have the CDs and books and we’ll be doing two more poems besides the Jim set — “Snakes On A Plane” and a mystery poem…C’mon down and hang with us.
Gigs
I’m at the Stone Soup Poetry reading tonight as a feature (solo, no Faro) at 8:00 at the Out Of The Blue Gallery, 106 Prospect St., Cambridge. If you can show up, great! If anyone from Worcester who isn’t going out to see the team in Westfield wants a ride, let me know — love to have some company.
And tomorrow night, Faro and I will be performing Jim’s Fall plus a couple of extras at Gotpoetry Live, 8 Governor St, Providence. We’ve worked up yet another poem for the set, so if you’ve only seen the Jim’s Fall work, c’mon down. We’ll be recording for a DVD as well! Reading starts at 7:30 or so.
TTFN
A thought before sleep:
Poets who’ve grown up in slam tend to have less sense of themselves as poets within the long arc of poetic history. Less vision for the future, less ambition for universality, less urge to strive to reach/surpass poetic masters past and present.
It’s a personal observation, not a very scientific one, and I’m not sure whether it is a negative or a positive or a neutral.
Discuss.
Elephant Teeth
“An elephant grows, loses, and regrows five sets of teeth in a lifetime. When the sixth set is regrown and then lost, the elephant starves to death.”
— random fact found on the Internet
The circus elephant
had thought about it
for years, imagining
the last tooth falling from her head
while she stood absurdly balanced
on some red white and blue footstool.
When it finally happened,
in a railroad car trundling between
one three-day stand and the next,
she barely noticed. One minute
it was there and the next — gone.
She missed the tiny clink of it
hitting the shit-stained floor.
Walking down the ramp
to the holding yard, she felt hungry
but kept her mind off that
by calculating the hours
and the number of shows
she had left in her — soon enough there’d be
no more footstools and foofy feathers,
no more chain around the leg, no more
patience needed.
She knew the bullet
would come first, well before
she fell wasted to her knees and rolled over into
the savanna sleep she’d wanted
for so long, but she didn’t mind:
any savior is welcome
to a circus elephant
who (for much of her life)
stood on one leg
and danced for children
in the stink of a tent for hours at a time
waiting for the next train ride, the next
dull meal, the next illusion of home
glimpsed through the slats of a boxcar
moving through Kansas.
After the Jim Poems
OK.
Next step: a series of poems introducing Sondra, the woman who’s going to eventually connect with Jim. I am nearly certain it will not be a romantic connection.
Then, one long poem about their connection and closing their stories.
All set to music, of course.
How to live fully and stupidly
Recall, always, that a belief in certainty and security is for suckers. You’re never safe. If you think you’re safe, you’re in even more danger.
Live armed and prepared and find your moments of joy between the wars. Humans were made for struggle; we thrive on it as long as we accept it as our lot.
If moving with the Tao is moving in a river, it’s a red one.
Dark Matter 