Dark Matter

Thanks for comments. Closer to the meaning I wanted now; still working on the music…

SUICIDE NOTES {take two}

SUICIDE NOTES

the Worcester semi final slam tonight. First one I’ve missed in years.

I wasn’t feeling all that well, but mostly I was bored. I’m bored in general by a lot of things right now. I think I hate poetry and poets a lot…

I did get to sit with Morris, which helped me a bit with maintaining a modicum of interest in things for a while; nonetheless, I am missing something…

I read “The Frontier” tonight, and have been working on it since I got home; the last lines aren’t working at all. The immediate solution is to cut them, but I think it’s too easy that way.

But why bother?

I feel like I can’t read poetry any more the way I have always tried to read it — as if it were the last thing I would ever do, and so needed to be invested in it to that level for the sake of excellence and legacy and passion…Know why?

Because I did it tonight, as I always do; said those words to myself before I started…and all I could think of was, “So what? So what if it is the last thing you’lll ever do? Who here will care? Who will recall that? It’s just another stupid poem by just another stupid poet, just another idiot masturbation.”

We’d be better off as ghosts. We’d haunt people longer.

I copied this from Wanda Coleman’s recent article in the LA Weekly concerning the furor over her criticism of Maya Angelou’s most recent book.

I posted this to the slam list as well…I think it’s a good encapsulation of one of the key issues regarding slam/performance poetry today: the apparent unwillingness to honestly critique each other’s work.

Would love your thoughts…

“ALL LITERARY CRITICISM, AT ROOT, IS BIASED because each reviewer
must bring to the act his or her individual world-view and aesthetic
sensibility.

Each must decide if the social values of a text as a political record
are more important than its literary values…

But fostering an illusion of excellence where none exists, regardless
of the writer or subject matter, is to do a democratic readership the
ultimate disservice.

Saying amen to the going cultural directives, minus a true analysis,
is as morally suspect as any bigoted criticism — whether done out of
guilt, fear, or the desire to compensate the author for the social
ills that shaped his or her existence.”

— Wanda Coleman

============================================================

12:00:

And within minutes, I had been told that my posting this “as a white man” was dangerous because I resembled those white Republicans who claimed to understand how Martin Luther King would react because they’ve taken individual comments out of context.

Y’know, I really ought to let my dad know that I’ve been promoted to “white”.

I just posted a comment to the slam list suggesting that Maya Angelou isn’t a great poet.

I am taking bets on how long it will be before I am called a “hater”.

Who’s in?

Starting a poem
at midnight is
a goddamn awful idea –

sitting straight up in bed
just because a spider crossed
your face
and now
you’re awake

what good is
thinking about writing now
get some sleep

anyway
once you dust off a shit idea for a poem
(and don’t they all seem so good until you
actually
think them through?)
you’ll just head off to bed most nights
anyway

I mean
hell
if you’re smart
you’ll opt for more pocket change
or for getting laid
instead of bending over to kiss that spider
hoping it’s the same fairy tale spider
that miss muffet damn near sat herself
upon

(thinking miss m was a wuss
when it came to
arachnids and
it’s a sin
all that poison going to waste
just because ) but

what the hell
any poem worth writing will cost you
and when all you need to do to pay up
is bend to it
rub your eyes
suck that spider in and let it
roll around on your tongue
then
simple enough
poet
you ought to do that
let the pen flow where it may even if
the words escape like eight legs skittering
like pens on glass where the ink wipes clean
as soon as it leaves the nib

fuck miss muffet and sleep alike
there’s work to be done

Thoughts welcome.

The Frontier

This is a short week at work. I ought to be busy. I’m not.

PERFECT WORLD

In a perfect world,
Roy Horn could have saved
himself. So let me say this right up front:

I am not Roy, I am not even Siegfried, and I cannot make anything disappear.
Therefore, Lord, let me give up. I will turn toward the headlines
and surrender my own head to the tiger, and

into his jaws, his ivory ridged answer, I shall commend my spirit.
I shall learn to speak in sitcom
and imagine in high definition what it’s like to be at war –

if my left eye opens,
I will wash it in a pool of agreement and dry it
with a flag.

Let me hear the roll call again — call out the names of those fated
to die for overdetermined reasons.
Think for instance of the Flight 11 passengers

watching the river passing
too close below, seated under the watchful eyes
of robots praising razors before God. Lord,

I should set their cries to music; somebody teach me
the chords to a country song. I should light a candle for them at dusk; somebody
piss me a gasoline river, pass me a lighter. Somebody

pardon me for being slow to resign myself –
I had a hard life, was raised among Masonite paneling, insult flavored rugs,
marketing for the survival of the thinnest —

I used to think I deserved a shot at redemption. Don’t I owe myself
a chance to be in the majority?
You promised once that I’d be unique; now, we’re all supposed

to be unique together. What happened?
Weren’t we supposed to be on top?
The apple pie apple of every eye?

Wasn’t this supposed to be our century, our planet, our time to shine
with the Coca-Cola glazed and handsome sheen
of the skin on a roasted hog?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still down with it; it’s just that I’m finding it harder to believe.
It’s too damn hard to think through the roaring. Everybody dies
for something these days. Somebody, anybody, even the Lord —

tell me something simple, and I’ll pretend that I like dying for it,
even as I wonder why Roy wasn’t faster, swinging the mike at the tiger’s head
and leaping back in time to laugh and laugh

at how those handsome teeth closed on air?
Why were our free will and his gleaming magic not enough to stop the blood?
Why isn’t history dead? Why are we still at war?

I swear I didn’t notice the resemblances in the first lines until after this was complete…a “My Sweet Lord” defense, to be sure, but the honest truth.

IN A PERFECT WORLD, ROY HORN WOULD SAVE AMERICA FROM ITSELF

Let me say this: I am not Siegfried, I am not Roy, I cannot make anything disappear —
so, Lord, let me give up.
Let me surrender my head to the tiger, and

into his jaws, that ivory ridged answer, I shall commend my spirit.
Let me surrender into a peace beyond understanding. Let me learn to think in “dramedy”.
Let me think in high definition of what it’s like to be at war,

and if my left eye opens,
I will wash it in a pool of agreement and dry it
with a flag.

Let’s hear the rollcall again: call out the names of those fated
to die for ill-determined causes;
think for instance of the Flight 11 passengers

watching the river passing
too close below, seated under the watchful eyes
of robots praising razors. Lord,

I want to set their cries to music, so somebody teach me
the chords to a country song. Somebody
piss me a gasoline river, then pass me a lighter. Somebody

pardon me for being incautious – hell,
I had a hard life, was raised among Masonite paneling, insult flavored rugs,
marketing for the survival of the thinnest —

don’t I deserve a shot at redemption? Don’t I owe myself a chance to be
passionate for something definable?
It was promised to me that I’d be unique.

We were all supposed to be unique together.
Isn’t this world supposed to be ours
as part of that bargain?

It’s just that I’m finding it hard to believe right now as I wonder
why Roy wasn’t faster, swinging the mike at the tiger’s head
and leaping back in time to laugh and laugh

at how the handsome teeth closed on air. Why were free will and shiny magic
not enough to stop the blood?
Why isn’t history dead? Why are we still at war?

It’s just too damn hard to think through all the roaring. Everybody dies
for something these days: somebody, anybody,
just tell me something simple I can pretend to die for.

The subject matter has been floating around for a while, but this is just first crack at it. Thoughts?

He takes his daughter to her first
day in the dorms
and discovers that she’s assigned
to a room across the hall
from the room he had when he was here,
the room where he’d first
spent a whole night in bed with a woman.

He recalls her name.
Her first name was Cindy, and her second name was
Moses. He can recall that when they lay together
his hands nested upon her from behind so perfectly, settling into
the curve of her waist and her hip, and from there it was perfectly positioned to
slide forward and down into
her…and damn it, that’s all he can recall.

Dad? Can you help me move this bed?
His daughter stares at him. Are you here?
Sure, he says. I’m here.
Then he says, before he realizes: Good idea to move the bed. Don’t
want the guys in the next dorm to see what you’re up to in there.
She rolls her eyes in something like shock. DAD!
He smiles sheepishly, and reaches for the headboard rail.

Downstairs, they hug an awkward goodbye, he slips her
an extra fifty bucks. See you next weekend, she says, I’m
coming home for more stuff. He nods,
thinks about what he wishes he could remember,
then catches her by the arm: Listen, he wants to say, the learning here
is critical. Learn what’s important. Hang on to those moments.
Don’t come home every weekend, if that helps at all. But they just hug again.

All the way home he takes back roads.
He tries to remember anything more about that night twenty-six years ago
but draws a huge blank while driving through the late summer tunnels
of green, the long light stippling the road and the car.
Exactly, he thinks. That’s it exactly.
It’s like a sketchbook. It’s not at all
like a photo.

OK, another go ’round…

I really thought about some of the original critique of this piece from y’all…although I didn’t necessarily agree with all of it, it certainly informed the edits. Thanks, folks.

AS SLOW AS POSSIBLE

Sept. 5, 2001:
A group of musicians and philosophers begin to inflate the bellows of a church organ in Halberstadt, Germany, in preparation for a performance of John Cage’s piece, “As Slow As Possible”.

Hate’s eyes pop open;
he gets up, dresses,
steps outside.

Hate finds that while most people do not want to talk to him,
there are still others who embrace him, taking him to mean something
he never wanted to be;
and all Hate can do is numbly
submit, for no does not mean no,
when your name is Hate.

Although he’s dragged it with him for so many years,
Hate does not understand his own baggage.

He tries to pretend that his name is
meaningless. He tells himself it’s
simply a breath
pushed through a half smile, ending in a full stop
behind his tongue.
Every other thing it carries
was added by others along the way.

Hate thinks of himself as having had
so much potential.
It’s all their fault
for having robbed him.

“As Slow As Possible” was originally written in 1944, at the end of WWII, as a piano piece that would last a half hour or so, based on the natural decay of the notes being played. This organ arrangement virtually eliminates the possibility of decay, and creates the space for the performance of an indefinitely long piece of music.

Hate prefers silence.
Assuming that to be a disability, everyone who meets him
offers Hate
a voice to speak through.

When he does attempt to speak on his own behalf,
Hate’s throat cracks.
The edge of his own meaning salts his tongue.
Nothing green can grow there.

The vision of those who now inflate the bellows is that this piece will be played beginning to end, and that the distance between the beginning and end of this performance will be 639 years. The people who will play this music will die before completing their service to the piece. The people who will complete the service are not yet born.

In slack moments Hate tells himself:

“If I were to change careers, I’d be a baker.
All the loaves I baked
would split open at the far end
and grow larger as they were eaten.
You’d never want for more,
would never get to the end of a loaf.

If I were to marry
I’d pick a partner named Bread Dancer.
If Bread Dancer and I were to have children
they’d be named Easter and Breakfast.
Bread Dancer would dance the bread dance
for each person
who bought bread.

After many years
I would leave the business to my children,
and they would bake for others’ children,
and that’s the way
it would go for as far out
as I can see.”

The church that holds the organ was purchased strictly to house this organ and this performance. It was unused for years, and is now refurbished as a place for the longest music to stretch out. There are still pipes waiting to be installed. This organ cannot even yet play all the necessary notes to complete the piece.

Hate finally moves from his home, burning it
behind him, leaves in the dead hour before dawn,
taking little with him, no ID, no passport.

Hate becomes a monk
on multiple roads,
plays at pilgrim and tinker,
but always ends up a soldier,
always regrets,
turns away,
always, always,
always.

Feb. 5, 2003:
The first chord of the piece is struck upon that organ. Lead weights hold the keys down, and the notes will sound for the next year and a half.

Hate, after poisoning
many years
with his wandering,
discovers the Halberstadt church
and enters to pray
for amnesia.

Everything must be possible, even if it has not yet been imagined.

First draft…

Goodbye, he thinks, to
all the useful heroes: the grandfather drunk on Sunday
afternoon, his boxers stained and ragged, bellowing
for another beer; the father in brown robe and socks
glimpsed from the hiding place at the top of the stairs
in the act of demanding a fast fuck
from the tired mother in the kitchen;
the neighbor who
pisses in the prize roses after coming home hammered yet again from work,
then slaps his daughter when she says she is “gonna tell”;
the sons and brothers of all these men, who
whispered the lessons from mouth to ear and into
tradition.

Goodbye as well to the helpful menagerie:
the invisible elephants hulking
in colonial-style living rooms, shitting the braided rugs
while alcoholic salesmen and pedophile pastors smile around them,
tiptoeing toward their secret goals; the fish out of water flopping
in the corners of rumpus room make-out parties, hoping to God the lights
don’t come on; the barkers and woofers and pigs sentenced to oblivion by castes
of beautiful people; the goats of football boys, who arm themselves with broomsticks
to stoke the yearning for unconfessed homoerotic brawn
in a bonding ritual on Friday nights before the big game; the gates of the zoo
are open now, and whoever let the dogs out can’t
begin to put them back in.

And goodbye at last, he thinks,
to the women who seemed to him
were always there to make dinner and diaper
and blowjob just happen, who never seemed
to say a discouraging word to those cowboys,
who may have spoken and sobbed and stared into space
when no one was looking, but if no one is there to see it happen
does it ever happen –

goodbye at last he thinks: because
a woman is looking him in the eyes now,
and saying no, and is not tentative or frightened,
just simply refusing;

goodbye at last, he thinks;
and as he sways, drunk and disbelieving,
putting one hand out to steady himself against
the grey-brown side of the newly solid elephant,
he has the newfound decency
to lower his eyes before her.

ENABLER

Call me black ice —
when you see me,
call me the place you skid.

Call me shadow’s fragrance,
named for the way
a bad night stings you raw for days.

Call me water on granite,
wearing you down over time.
Think of me as a sink full of bones
and greasy teacups.
When you come up for air,
slimed in old blood
and rotting greens, I’ll be
your horror.

Call me the technology
of ultimate sleep.
Make me
responsible for
the deaths of Herculaneum
and Pompeii,
finger me for the one who guided
the sulfur rain
and even flow of
death’s mud
over Vesuvius’ flanks.

No matter
what you call me,
I will look back at you
and say:

yes,
I am that,
I am the thing
I am labeled.

You’ll shine
more
that way.

There’s a hole in me the size of a departing flight.
Something taxis up to the edge and takes off, flying out of me toward a horizon.

(It’s not that I can see any horizon; I just know that’s
what planes fly into. It used to be the wild blue yonder that planes

flew into, but no one thinks planes are that wild anymore — they seem to us
more like stale buses full of cranky people eating meals that don’t

fill them, much the same way that nothing fills me now.)
I keep thinking, even after my mind falls into the hole in me and disappears,

that I’m going to rise and follow that vapor trail into the blush,
catch up to the flight before the sun goes down;

you’d think I’d know better by now,
I ought to know better by now,

I ought to be able
to figure this one out.