Blood Poem

So this week I guess I was thinking about the strength and pride many members of the African American community have found in their roots and how I don't have any of that, and how maybe that's because my ancestors were evil bastards. So I tried to look out the eyes in my blood and see what they saw if they were slavers. It was pretty upsetting I think and I was split between trying to be honest and I think a mistaken attempt to try and be righteously against slavery, which is stupid because everybody is already against slavery (I hope) and I actually think distancing myself from the acts of my ancestors is the cowardly thing to do. I may be blameless, but I can still feel it somewhere... Maybe this is all a fiction. I don't know if they were slavers. It still hurts as though they were to read about all this.

Memory Poem

There are eyes in my blood that roll in my sleep

Receipt paper white men’s eyes

And

We all know you want it to quiet sometimes man so you can forget things about your past

But let’s see if I those eyes can’t show me what you already suspect you know…

Go back

                    go back

                                    go back and

laughing with some other Dutch…

Waves in waves cool and sweet as Guava juice

Port nameless to me in a slave world where I am king

Under an Ivory Coast sky that burns me branded red

So that everyone can recognize me for what I am if I run away...

But I won’t run

Why would I run?

When we’ve taken four hundred slaves

That have no names at all

...

They moan belowdeck constant like cicadas inside a living human skull

Except when they wake up screaming because they can still smell the guava in their mother’s hair

...

I’m a navigator

And maybe I I hope that one day we’ll trap and collide with the setting sun 

This whole damned boat will disintegrate

And that's why I steer west so straight and true 

But it seems an unlikely explanation for my actions

When every rape is a matter of course and every lashing is an occasion for applause

...

About two dozen cargo on this journey will leap overboard

Hoping for just one more moment in that sweet guava water of home

Before they drown

In the miles deep of the mid-Atlantic

...

And what a shame, that’s two dozen less to sell

 ...

And these are the words of the eyes in my blood.

But that’s not what I want to see.

Not me, not me.

Because I can see that boat disintegrate into parchment

Memories in a book

That I can burn and breathe

In the smoke out the smoke

Till the blood memory is gone

And I can think of the horrors of the world and see not a mutilation but a rapture of eyes,

So many eyes!

Eyes over the Atlantic,

Choking the sky,

My eyes and theirs

Gaping out from death eternal at stupefying…   

             

                        Denial? Ambivalence? Unity? Forgiveness? What?

I can't figure out how to end this. 

Godsong

This week we've been listening to gospel which is ecstatic, passionate music- it really is- and also awful, life-sucking music. Perhaps I've allowed Nietzschean pessimism about the God business to influence me too deeply. Well, we'll see shortly.

Throughout the country and gospel canon (and the more ancient Christian hymnal canon) there is a preoccupation with the idea that "this world is not our home." This is not merely a motif. It is a powerful longing for the sweet chariot of death to come down and take us away. And this is the sort of theme that as often as not carries the ecstasy of the music. It kind of makes everything about the music bittersweet- is there anything more heartbreaking than that the great religious soul of the American South should be a hatred of this world and a longing for death?

People need to believe in something, but if believing in God makes them reject this world, than I reject God. Don't worry Dubov-sky, you didn't drive me to Atheism. Atheism is a ditch outside of town I drove myself to last summer. Anyway, I wrote a song about how I felt this week. Lyrics, as always, are hard to write and these are the best I could do for now. Check in soon to see if I've got a more permanent solution.

Godsong

I’m not one to pray for rain

Or make the world in seven days

But look out for me

I’ll be hanging around

Dreams they grow they laugh they play

Then they die and they decay

Better not to leave them

Lying round the house

Things might start a-growing

That'd gross you out

God was such a dream for me,

God fit me so beautifully

Sometimes I wish God was still

Hanging around

Sometimes I wish God were

Hanging around

But boundless goodness tied

To a boundless cruelty

Doesn’t make even a little

Sense to me

This world is my mother and my home

The better world’s awaiting 

In your bones

I have seen some awful things

Inconceivable the responsibility

That someone like god

Would have to hold

Such a complex character

I don’t know…

I’ve been so angry

Don’t give me that Book of Job soliloquy

Not everything is part

Of a plan

Sometimes there is really

Not a plan

And I just don’t believe

That a divine intelligence

Would name itself lord

Neither god’s nor master’s anymore

Faithless whether rain or shine

Rich or poor

Alone I’ve coped with all I’ve known

Alone I’ve built shrines out of bones

They’ll stand till I am dust

And then who knows?

The gentleness of dust

Will be my home

Week 2 project (keep it simple)

I suffered this week from an overabundance of ideas.

I wrote guitar lines and chord structures without melodies and poems with plans for performance art.

The last one is worth elaborating upon as it will probably appear next week...

I've been thinking about the old phenomenon of topical songs- you know, you sing the way you feel, or whatever going on for you or the people that you know. It's above all else a catharsis. Alan Lomax covered this extensively in his accounts of "seriousness" and pathos of this fairly simple art- the cowboy singing lonesome in the desert, the black farm hand howling in the field.

The world changes but that NEED FOR CATHARSIS does not. And where is Catharsis now? It's in the tubes! The inter-tubes!

Blogs my friends! Blogs!

This is a type of folk song but we have forgotten and have no cultivated skill. We type in rhythms "free and rabid" (that is, not in rhythm) and do not stack our blogs into harmonies!

SO I wanted to do a performance piece about treating the act of writing as an act of music. The rhythm bit was easy enough to imagine (if difficult to perform.) You simply memorize a poem and type it in tempo. I'm gonna do a waltz time.

Interesting revelation: When you type in time (as I did in "hollds you to the sound of the vvvvvvaelley" bit,) the idiosyncrasies of singing begin to emerge naturally. The accent was unplanned, but something about the necessities of typing in time made a rhythm dialect occur.

Harmony is a little harder to imagine and I'm still trying to figure out how it could work.

Here's some text I wrote to go with it, but it's not my best (though I like the concept) and I'm waiting till this project is more complete before performing.

The bards don’t sing anymore or play the harp

The people don’t sing anymore…

They click and clack

Waltzing into blogs on fingers

That seem to float on rhythms unfree and rabid…

A bunch of fucking lobsters all

Hooked into macbook keys

And stumbling over the heat of cybernetic feet

Just a bunch of bumpkin lobsters

Trying to sing the songs of the day

Let me show you how to move

Hoioigbaaioegoiasiofwgn

Justin caase you lose your wway teher ies the tether

Thait hollds you to the sound of the vvvvvvaelley.

1… 2… 3… 1… 2… 3… 1… 2… 3…

Anyway, that was all too much, so instead I'm just going to do a cover of You Are My Sunshine, except inspired by broadsides, I'm just going to keep the tune and change the words. I thought about other forms of light, and immediately Moonshine came to mind, so I wrote the song from the perspective of an alcoholic to his Moonshine. I'll do it in class.


I'll record it and that poem from last week soon and post them online.

First song.

                 The first music I ever heard (not just around me but first music really HEARD) was my mother playing piano. Songs unspecific, a couple leap to mind (Gloryland, Friend.) I wasn't paying too much attention anyway- I hated it. I hated piano and disliked music for at least the first 12 years of my life. And because of my constant complaining (and probably also in part because of the trauma of the suicides of her brothers, though you'd think that would be exactly the time to make art) my mother stopped playing piano.

                I didn't know this till about a year ago, when I started actually listening to her songs, many of which are quite beautiful. I'd seen the joy on her face of course in those rare occasions she would play but... she would only play so rarely. I couldn't understand it.

                Anyway, when I asked her about it she told me "There's no music in my heart anymore."

                So I wrote this poem about it.

                It's a little more "academic" poetry than I usually do- working with spaces kind of trying to capture between dream memories of boyhood and my own incoherent, broken up feelings about the whole business.

Why my mother doesn't write music anymore

            My Private world is rough and clear,                     

ice formations            terrible power           it hovers and glows above my head

what a disappointing head!

never had enough mange for my liking              

   not enough mange for a king

like I was in the past          

    you know    slumped low             on        heavy breathing beast

on

 rained out road    dark eyes can go on for miles                                       

teardrop shaped columns of

steel men  

 marching towards some… 

notorious... 

fate…

…

…

and yet here is my mother’s piano playing…

tender 

some kind of blue light 

that

loosens your spine

makes you slump forward a little 

twitches your mouth in all directions when the bliss notes sway...

sort of a churched up late night sea flavored piano playing...

mosaic light 

you know wwhat I’m talking about??…

  

Anyway

I’m tugging at her sleeve and begging her to stop because the sound hurts me… 

(to this day I'm not sure why)

                           

    

14 years later we are having trouble sleeping

in a dead family home

                      night tongues loose and talking

 telling forbidden things

Like I tell her "You deserved a different son"                      

    And she tells me "I'm so afraid"

            With her talk voice what bends upwards

When she meets strangers

      chuckles a little

           

                 silence 

        

                          And then

                                                           "There's just no more music in my heart" 

                                    I remember

            Tugging at her sleeves… 

 “momma… please don’t play piano anymore... the sound of the chords is a needle in my mouth..."

          

            HER WORDS

"You rescued me

            I was hopeless and on the run

            Out of dances

            Out of chances with everyone

            You’ll never know how your being there

            Healed me then

            Never know how I loved my friend

            I love my friend"

           

             Notes so pure and beautiful that they could still a bullet midflight

(and I recall  brother Mark’s gun to his head)                   

            Notes hopeful enough to try raising the dead

(Brother Peter leaps off of his balcony         It's not like when she was young anymore

terrified for a second                                    Then they played her on small town radio

that he might actually fly                     )       The orchards bent dancing to Gloryland (her radio song) 

Her notes I swear could mend the wings of family tree                         

                                                                     All the townsfolk how they shook their heads                 

                                                                     kicked the summer dirt and smiled

                                                                     “she’s going places.”

            “Just no more music in my heart” she says,

and she doesn’t blame me, she blames the whole of her life, but I’ve connected the dots, and I know I played a part, and sometimes the guilt of it is just enough to make me want to lay down and cry.