Foghorn Leghorn by Big Bruiser Dope Boy

April 12, 2019May 4, 2019 ·

Hologram Baby

Baby I’m a disposable camera.

Baby you stop me dead in my tracks, burn a hole in my brain.

Baby I’m your biggest fan, I’m wearing your t-shirt, can’t you read the pop-calligraphy?—can’t you recognize your own handwriting?

Baby I’ve got filing cabinets full of dreams you wrote, my office is dripping with dream-juice, my hands are holding fresh dollar bills, ready to spend on you.

Baby you make it all seem worthwhile, you get me out of bed in the morning, you make the coffee taste hopeful, you make me leave the house with confidence and go to the office where I fill cabinets with dreams of you.

Baby take these handcuffs off of me, now put them back on.

Baby your picture exposes the end of what I desire, which is the beginning of what I desire, a road paved in dreams.

Baby the cacti are singing me road directions.

Baby I’m confused, the world is changing—quick, tell me something I can trust even for a second because I can’t come up with anything good.

Baby stop hiding me in the utility closet.

Baby stop looking like an angel.

Baby don’t open your mouth, don’t ruin the suspense we’ve worked so hard to sustain.

Baby my hair is standing on end, my nerves scrambling to catch up with you, playing possum in the moonlight.

Baby the wise know their foolishness well.

Baby you were cast in bronze, racing headlong toward me through a hot glass tunnel.

Baby the glass is cracking, you’re humming in my ears like a flute.

Baby thinking of you like this is a holy tradition at this point.

Baby I see you across the room at the party, I can’t hear you, but from the look on your face I can tell what you’re talking about me—you’re talking about finding the disease in me.

Baby the world is hungry and so are we, but we’re harmless enough you and I—tadpoles in a puddle of tears.

Baby you may be my baby but I feel just like a child when it comes to you, I’m trying to stay warm in the nest you built.

Baby puke inside my mouth, tell me something I can strap my heart to with a horse-hide belt.

Baby fire is quiet and painless and ice is a punishing screech in the wild.

Baby our bodies are being destroyed and I can’t turn my eyes away from you.

Baby I’m sorry for being dramatic but the world, inexplicable and cancerous, moves like an insect across the ceiling.

Baby was that you on the side of a building, riding a golden wagon in the sunset?

Baby, I hope I’m right on target, hope I’m reaching you clear.

Baby are you tuned in?—is this making any sense?

Baby our kingdom has epilepsy, we live in a sensitive fortress, we might have to smuggle ourselves out in disguises to survive.

Baby you’re just over this hill, just around this corner, just through this door, I can see your shadow hinting safety from where I stand, I’ll follow the necessary logical steps.

Baby we’re ruthless when we talk to each other, do we really believe it’s fun to drag this cruel contest out?

Baby I have to go to the bathroom, if you don’t have an excuse to shut your eyes I’d be glad to give you one if it’ll help, because baby, I’m here to help.

Baby we are commas in each other’s breaths, hitches in each other’s steps.

Baby we only want to feel what we heard feels good.

Baby let’s put on the rubber gloves and go on a rampage, we’ll have the town talking for weeks.

Baby gossip flings off of us effortlessly: all we do is tell ourselves stories, we’re a force to be reckoned with.

Baby what are we doing now?—let’s find another problem we can’t solve.

Baby you remind me I’m not yet finished with the task at hand, your tent glowing on the mountainside, I can smell the smoke from the meadow below.

Baby I’ll be there soon, don’t fall asleep yet, it’s cold, I’ll make my way up the mountain in the dark.

Baby I have no way of knowing what I’ve done, I’m walking to you without a person to count on.

The Philosopher-King

April 10, 2019May 23, 2019 · Leave a comment ·

He called his grand scheme sophiarchism and it was ludicrous. As he prepared the oils, butters, silver instruments, and paint, he outlined a system of government where the only voters were holders of social science PhDs. The notion that the governing power should be concentrated in the hands of capable specialists. Heavy stuff. She wasn’t entirely sure she had the right approach but something seemed… unpatriotic about it.

He approached her with an emory board and lazily she shifted her hand so that it lay on the armrest of the reclining chair. He began to file her pinkie gently. That he had a grand scheme was lovely, she thought. That he had a scheme at all. His polo was mint green, his apron pure white, his khaki pants straight to his strong-looking legs. He worked cocoa butter into her skin. When he hit the spot between her index and thumb bones, tense as a broken wing with carpal tunnel, she moaned. “Oh,” he said softly, as if surprised, “Lisa, let it go.” When the manicure was over he brought her a thimble of espresso, jet black in a doll-size cup.

—

I wrote this last spring and I still think about it occasionally because it perfectly encapsulates how I feel that I have something to say but have no idea what it is. I know I should just shut the fuck up… but…

Looking back on the piece I can tell I was thinking about intimate situations in which people who aren’t in the habit of listening have to listen. What might make them want to listen (sex appeal, physical pleasure, color). Also about the kinds of jobs people who might have been academics end up doing. Also about hands and the innumerable things they do. How much I love to encounter an idea out of context, in the wild.

It’s occurred to me that this is a terrible piece because it’s riddling, but not in the satisfying way. “Write poems, not puzzles” is deeply solid criticism I have received. But real life, at least to me, seems mostly to consist of unsatisfying puzzles and non-epiphanies. At least in writing you can style the riddle so that it feels good in your brain. I have a not-very-coherent thought about writing as ASMR, about head-scratchers and head-scratchers. After all, what’s the difference between something that’s ambient and something that’s vague?

Intention, I guess. But why write (more) useless bullshit?

Why not, I guess. Someday someone might pick it up and realize it’s music.

XTC

April 5, 2019September 18, 2019 · Leave a comment ·

One of my dad’s many musical passions is just-left-of-center British rock from the 70s and 80s. As a middle schooler I was as likely to get into Eric Clapton as he was into Nero, but we could always agree that Brian Eno, Genesis, and David Bowie were good stuff.

Of all the bands he showed me XTC is probably the weirdest. I love it protectively. I won’t summarize this pretty accurate listicle but what made XTC so great, while simultaneously dooming them, was their inability to pick one sound and stick with it.

The XTC song I encounter in the wild most often is ‘Senses Working Overtime’. Twice this year I’ve heard it while shopping for clothes. ‘Senses Working Overtime’ is a catchy alternative track with cute-sounding but ultimately cynical lyrics: “My, my, sun is pie / There’s fodder for the cannons / And the guilty ones can all sleep safely”. It’s probably XTC’s most listenable song.

As a wearyingly literal kid, something I loved about XTC was that no matter how well I knew the words, I never had too strong a grasp on what Andy Partridge was actually saying.

Pulsing pulsing,
There’s a beat in his arm still.
Pulsing pulsing,
Like the throb of an anthill.
Pulsing pulsing,
No death in the rain.
I’ve been washing my hands
In the stuff I wash my brains.

When the songs had a clear message they were rebellious in ways I could understand and sympathize with: fuck organized religion, fuck whispering neighbors, fuck authoritarian middle-class parents.

And when I wanted to dance, I could really throw myself around the living room to the tune of ‘Ten Feet Tall’.

As I got older the songs that resonated were the ones about trouble in romantic relationships. “Why on earth do you revolve around me? / Aren’t you aware of gravity?” There are plenty of lovely love songs XTC’s catalogue, but the stories are never easy.

Punch and Judy
Did it truly
And were married in a haste.
In love, maybe,
Using the baby
As a kind of romance paste.
She’s grown fatter,
Her hair cut shorter,
Looks much older than nineteen.

My dad relinquished his XTC CDs to me, though retained sovereignty over the vinyl. Criminally underappreciated, Mummer was the disk I carried in my backpack and forced my friends to listen to. It opens with the aggressive, plucky, Middle Eastern inspired (?) ‘Beating of Hearts’. There’s a fair amount of chanting. It closes with the least convincing pop song of all time, ‘Funk Pop A Roll’. I can’t defend listening to the entire album and haven’t done it in years, but a few bars of ‘In Loving Memory of a Name’ always made my dad emotional—and now me.

But my favorite XTC CD, the one that barely left my CD player, was Rag & Bone Buffet. Not until later did I find out Rag & Bone Buffet is all B-sides and radio versions. That means that the versions of XTC songs I have in my head are not the ones that were popular. I still find it disorienting to hear the unremastered version of ‘Respectable Street.’

There’s absolutely nothing cohesive about Rag & Bone Buffet (if you couldn’t tell from the title). I loved it because every song was a new stab at songwriting. There’s the totally ambient ‘Over Rusty Water’ and the dubby ‘Cockpit Dance Mixture’. Andy Partridge’s voice may be the unifying feature, but it’s not powerful enough to hold XTC’s discography together.

I would never have been able to come to XTC as an adult because technologically my approach to music is so different. These days I’m never stuck listening to the same CD over and over. If I hadn’t had to listen to each song so many times, I don’t think I ever would have been able to hear the lyrics. And the lyrics are where XTC truly shines.

A song that speaks to me more today than it used to is from the first on Rag & Bone Buffet, ‘Extrovert’. It goes:

No hidden message, nothing political,
You needn’t listen, I just wanted to show.
I’m feeling extrovert.
I am the lion who’s roaring, not the mouse that gets hurt.
I feel like someone else,
Yes I do, yes I do, yes I do.
I feel like someone else,
I feel new, not so blue.
I feel.

“Snow” by James Schuyler

April 4, 2019April 5, 2019 · Leave a comment ·

Spring
snow thick and wet, porous
as foam rubber yet
crystals, an early Easter sugar.
Twigs
aflush.
A crocus
startled or stunned
(or so it looks: crocus
thoughts are few) reclines
on wet crumble
a puddle of leas. It
isn’t winter and it isn’t spring
yes it is the sun
sets where it should and
the east
glows
rose. No
willow.

Your Tucson

March 31, 2019April 2, 2019 ·

You said breaking the egg was like an electric shock.
There were roosters—it had been fertilized.
You said you didn’t look, you just cleaned it up.

Nostalgia for You

March 22, 2019February 28, 2019 ·

I was different then
weight and luster
like cellophane stretched
and crudely
coated neon

everything was happening
I believed
farther away in space
in time in sense

how far along the line?

bending over
left
the accounting
but how?

like a fluid, maybe
pressure and absence

sure
scars
carry water
stacked and
sorted

unstacked

and sorted again

we were dragging
a year behind us

we were prepared
to help

these were the games
our own

signals delicate
and interlacing

—

Thank you Billy.

Tollbooth by Bud Smith

March 20, 2019May 4, 2019 ·

Tollbooth by Bud Smith

“Fuck the past and all of the chains it wrapped around my heart and the webs the spiders spun around me while I was idle. Fuck what the werewolf moon did to my brain as I laid in wait for it to rise again so that I could head oblong towards oblivion. Fuck all the yawns of suburbia, the myths, the legends—the folklore of eternal life. Instead, war cry into the wind, we’re all gonna die. There’s no excuse for not kicking up the icing on birthday cakes while dark angels traced my life in doomed flight. Fuck the future, it meant nothing. I say bomb blasts to anybody who denies me. I say: I’m ripped apart down my spinal column anyway, I’m a thousand shards of ribs, I’m wayward planets thrown out of orbit—lost of magic. I’m on my way down.

Timing it just right, I released the videotape from my fingertips. It exploded against the side of the tollbooth: streams of film marked a black passage behind me, shards of plastic landed in the basket, loops of magnetic tape and sticker decal rapped against the toll window. I screamed in the face of some poor substitute girl. She lost her breath, falling over in tears.

I was four miles up the highway by the time she closed the booth, walked into the building, told Larry she needed to go home. She couldn’t explain what it was she’d seen; it was too horrible.”