Even As

 

You see them

On the street

Begging for money

In torn clothes limping

Or their wheelchair

Rolls crooked

Their eyes glossy

Or they're clear but gaze

Far beyond the scene

Their hair is matted

Or their head

Is shaved unevenly

And they need money

For a roof in the rain

Or some food

For drugs or alcohol

Or hot coffee

Sweetened thick

With packets of sugar

This is not defeat

It is a moment preceded

By some other calamity

We can scarcely imagine

Even as they shuffle

Or push along

The highway offramp

In the sunlight on

The painted yellow lines

Signals

 

Borges writes a story
About a cavalryman
In Tashkent
Who finds a musical score
For bone flute
Written in an unknown
System of notation
Buried among the ruins
Of a battlefield
There are conversations
As the soldier speaks
To imams & scholars
Seeking to decipher the tune
I write a poem
About the story
Somebody reads it
And writes a song
Which contains the melody
I try to find this person
Where are they

Wandering Through the Caves

 

sete cisnes voando sete corvos cantando

a pantera andando

pelo rio da caverna

as folhas da planta se abrindo

na chegada da noite azul

o espírito quer voar

pelos ares

Wandering through the caves you find a skiff

You sit down in it and drift
A panther appears on the ridge of the stream
And walks beside you
Mica reflected in the black water
Waking in the bones feels like cold water flowing
The plains blossom across the color spectrum
You see this in your mind projected beyond the cave walls
Words travel across the wind
Though the air remains still inside the cave
Along the dark stream you encounter an instrument
Five strings, a gourd bowl resonator
And you know how to play this
The panther appears again on the ledge beside you
You try to speak to her
She only looks at you
There is a guitar figure you wrote 30 years ago
Or maybe you dreamt you wrote it
You can play it now
And now the panther speaks
You are to follow the cave stream
Until the open fields blossoming
Across the color spectrum
Your old injury is gone away, disappeared
You should have been a swan
Gliding in the night lagoon
How is it that your ancestors lived
On a black volcanic island
Covered in flowers
You should have been a firefly
Flickering on the night plain
Or you were
Or you were a worm purifying soil
For the larger creatures
To eat, grow, die and decay back into the earth
The scale you play on the instrument
Has intervals that mirror the distance
Between thought and action
Between cloud and rain
Residue on the side of your craft
Blossoms iridescent as you push forward
Crystals flickering silently beneath you
You're drinking the cool water
And you approach a threshold

***

Hymn translation:

Seven swans flying Seven crows singing The panther walking Along the river in the cave

The leaves of the plant opening up With the arrival of the blue night The spirit wants to fly

Through the air

***

A composition with MiM for our set at the annual Night of Modular Synthesis at the Empty Bottle, Chicago, 8/27/24. Linked video is a portion of the set.

BENZOS ALCOHOL WEED

 

People take benzos

Drink alcohol smoke weed

To bring down a panic

Whose origin remains vague

Flickers in & out of the system

A rising a fluttering a wind

Benzos alcohol weed

Rearrange thoughts

Interrupt a chaos ritual

Whirring swiftly

Like a night insect

And place a gauzy calm

Between you & the world

Between you & that part of you

That prepares the ground

For the winged creature's eggs

That you must unearth

Name speak to befriend

Or bid farewell one day

(thank you to Carlos Monsivais for the phrase "ritual del caos")

Big Fun

 

how does

why does
miles
1969-1974
still sound like
multiple
futures

Two Short Antifascist Poems

 

PERFORMANCE ART

Donald Trump earnestly singing

"(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace Love & Understanding?"

ALEX JONES

If you pretend to be crazy for long enough

something happens

and it is not good

NOT THERE STILL NOW

 

My friend leaned out

Of a second story window

Of a wood slat 19th century

House slapped together

For Maine mill workers

And said I always wondered

What it would be like

To go mad

It was a bad experience

From which he did not return

But could have I think

Even as he had stopped

Forward motion

Or was receding

A march back up the ladder

Might have engaged

With enough time movement

And experiments

And failures

The state he entered

At the end

Was like he was

Demetabolizing

In order to pass through

A bank vault door

But had become stuck

Undone into particles

Trapped midway through passage

Within the mineral plane

Halted vibrating

At too high

A frequency to feel well

And too low

To move through

I hope he is not

There still now

I don't think he is

After he left

An information bulletin

Kept arriving in my mind

He was somewhere else

Solving what he couldn't here

PLAYLIST 8/23/24

 

At 6 AM things were appearing

In my sleeping mind

A series of tablets with numbers

That consoled me somehow

And surrounding the four bright slabs

Hovered something between music & sound

The scene ends when I hear

A knife tearing through paper

The 7 am car ignition

Of the man who lives next door

As the morning passes

In blocks of time

That surge and vanish

There are attempts to locate music

That could regain what was lost

Upon waking

Songs that might vanquish

The dream thief neighbor

Sunn O))) is pulses of bright

Viscous phosphorus matter

Shimmering in the distance

Ricardo Gomes & Domenico Lancelotti

Are murmuring analog

Modular crackling

To a morro nylon

Guitar cluster of signs

Refuge in a basement in Lisboa

I come upon the earliest

Existing piece of music

The papyrus scroll suggests

A descending minor scale

With angles reflecting its Ungarit

Night desert origins

Played on a lyre

The afternoon light shines through

The oak leaves turning them

From dark to bright clear green