WE CAN'T SEE THEM

There was a man standing in the screen doorway. Or maybe it was the dirt made it look that way. Anyway, someone was murderously hungry for the wrapped sandwich on the counter. Someone asked if it was dog meat and everyone could smell it. Then forever all meat smelled like dog. At least to the littlest one: a girl of four overhearing everything.

And her aunt was telling about the near-death experience: all white and there were trees cutting through the white and voices up close in her ear like this, of all the ancestors from Kansas and Arizona. All at once. And the aunt held up the dog meat sandwich wrapped and the girl wondered how everything could be white but not the trees and where do they go.

Where do the trees go after life? Or do they just grow. Do trees reach deeper into the ground and higher into the sky and can we tell how old everything is by looking at trees?

Or dust: our hands and the linoleum and everything are made up of smallest pieces like dust, like hairs, smallest pieces moving but we can’t see them. Even the trees are made up of this dust, these tiniest trees.

The screen door slammed on the shadow man. The aunt stepped outside and unwrapped her dinner and no one seemed terrified, least of all the dogs.

SUDDEN MANIC LAZE

Thick and sudden.
An almost herb but
The Glass Menagerie
Phoenix, a moment just outside the Heard 
Museum of American 
Indian Art and History.

Just because of May.
Wonder that wrinkled grass and clovers
tapered not
cut but just under feet of snow---
my baby claws at them and the Earth doesn't mind
doesn't moan

just stands.

Oil. Pads of feet touch the wooden floor
again

the freezer banks at my first job 21 years ago
---banana ice cream hairspray---
and Lilac Wine groping in the dark bathroom
---new carpet air conditioning---
beauty school oil massage deep into knuckles, chatting 
away like there's no skin, bones in our hands
again.

AHH---too much midwestern fever
screaming birds wow it's still dawn
because of May.

Share something from a can---
the dresser facing us from the back of the pick-up has a face etched---
pass the drink back and forth
manic laze---

---there was a half dream
while the baby was talking one hand
to the other hand---micro-waving fingers 
make expressive faces
and her voice low and serious---deedle deedle-torh
and I heard a half dream about a girl's 
hell being forever in the mill.

Thick and sudden May---
forever mill---
herbs in our bones
skins in our hands.

O' WORN ASPHALT

The Moon is in synchronous rotation with the Earth—always showing the face. Art is Holy because it is associative and thereby demonstrates our interconnectedness. Art is Communion.

We are entitled to our labor but not the fruits of our labor—be free. Noise punk. That old seashell.

AAHHH—reclaim punk from good-timey retro types and macho conformists. O’ Natural Satellite. We’re all so meta---. All this metal. Luuna.

DIY. Pure art force. The Moon is the same size in sky as the Sun. Witchy space inside. Chest cavity fire. Pulling up the tides—the oceans reach up to Moona. Sex is a meaty flower. A constant offering. The rates are not constant. Mona.

Dark Maria (seas) make your face. Come at me like a radio. (Fugazi: fucked up, got ambushed, zipped in.) There is an old man (in dreams) with his back against mine leaning-pushing-moaning-drooling but who is this stranger bossing at my back? He's like...wacked the fuck out. 

The Moon reminds us: Soul.

The Red Mother. The Red Tent. Art is Holy because it is associative and thereby reflects the experience of our interconnectedness. Art is communion.

Fuck careerism—the laborNow is the fruits—be free.

No career at the end of desire.

Art Holy Communionananda.

Wikipedia: “The Moon has an exceptionally low albedo, giving it a reflectance that is slightly brighter than that of worn asphalt. Despite this, it is the brightest object in the sky after the Sun.”

NEW RELEASE

I'm honored to be on another A SOUNDESIGN release!

Tomorrow, April 18th, is the release date for a split tape in the Versus series between me and Faangface. 

Check the release out at Bandcamp here. Check out A SOUNDESIGN RECORDING here.

For more about Faangface, check out my interview with Joshua Novak. 

For more about the creator of the beautiful A SOUNDESIGN RECORDING label, check out my interview with David Russell Stempowski. 

UNVEIL, UNSTUCK, UN-STRUCK SOUND

In love with the vocal on a mix tape from 1989: You’re here with me, but soon you will be gone…Desperate for concrete rhythm, we grabbed the bucket. And you. In love with modern moonlight. Compassion is better than a diamond—it’s a vaster rainbow jewel. Take the pain, but the joy, too, it’s all light. It’s all right. Surrender to compression of compassion—expaaansea!

This degree: it’s just something for the animals to chew on.

Infants talk to animals differently than they talk to people. Noise is. All the drugs in my heart. Diverse heart. Not just the sentimental clinging, but expanse of azure midnight, the dissolving moonlight, the cutting black trees. And this: a mouth in pillow forever screaming, and this: stupid white wine afternoons. Diverse heart. Radiant.

            Murder pissing on the monitor, and Juniper wearing long sleeves in summer. The babies—that is, you, me, and the earth under our foundations, basements carved into earth, our earth, and all slugs and flying things, and my baby and my fishy 17-year-old cat, are each spirals, each as sacred as a conch, a spark spit out in golden time, formed by space-time, but living as a full spiral within star-spiral-la all the same.

And there is that time of day, when the sun hits the base of the fractured mirror lamp just right, and little diamonds fleck on the living room walls, ceiling. My baby and I watch the manifestation. And later, it vanishes. We don’t know, but then we look up. The way the sun hits these walls with changing character through the spiraling seasons.

Come see the frog-lit human experience… Change of weather brings all the former lives crashing down around us like empty boxes from the last move.

When I was four, in 1982, my mother fell in love with the book William Blake’s Inn, by Nancy Willard, but we couldn’t afford it, so she borrowed it from the library, transcribed it, and read it to us.

Who cares about the Ramones, what about the river of hawks?

Sex is like voice. Is it clear. Is it unblocked, unstuck. Un-struck sound. Singular and universe. (Potential to blue.)

I dream-creep through hidden floors in rich people’s homes seeking secret stairs to the beach. At shows. Some people want to look like line drawings. Aw, there’s garbage everywhere!

VAST CRUEL

I’m living in a vast cruel 

landscape of honest weather

it rips me trips me skips me all the time and I’m getting sick of all this 

honest weather

time skips fast down one lane and I think my head’s in the other

rips me skips me flipping all the time and I’m getting well acquainted with the 

Red Mother

open hands up 

face the sky—all the sea is a wish

move slowly with care

don’t slip on the starry stairs

I’m living in a trust groove

landscape of human tether

say skip me rip me trip me all the time and I’m getting well acquainted with the

human weather

wanting makes the day break give me all the day break greedy for the day breaks

say no never end

and I wake in the dirty shell station 

the one right on the Sea

there is a bleached out green pool there with two lanes 

one for you

and one for me

but the sun is setting fast there and plastic barrels mount the land

I want to meet you where the sand breaks free

that patch of clean sand breaks free

fall asleep with our legs in the tiny waves

warm baby waves of the awful bright green sea

SPACE

Before Hubble, we didn’t know whether or not black holes existed in nature. Now we know they are at the heart of every known galaxy. We didn’t know other planets existed, and now we know they litter the universe, dripping with carbon and water.  Because of Hubble, we know the age of the universe: 13.8 billion years.

Thank you Hubble. Happy twenty-fourth birthday to you. Now we don’t have the money to send people out to fix you anymore, and maybe you're too far away to reach anyway, and so off you go, alone.

I grew up on lush, tree-lined Twelfth Street northwest in Canton, Ohio. Just up the hill from an elegant and mysterious park established in the gilded age. My neighborhood was borderline lousy—I was not allowed to go south of Tenth Street. But the century-old maples made us feel safe. Early memories, and middle memories streamed throughout my childhood are grounded by the oceanic whispers of the patient maples and their cool shadows twitching with sunlight on the sidewalks. The trees breathed through long hours, long years.

Canton is the second most dangerous small city in the United States. My father told me this week that the telephone company didn’t want to maintain the trees anymore, so they cut down all the trees on my old street. I don’t know how that worked exactly, cutting down trees in private yards, but they did, and my dad said it looks desolate, barren.

I can never show my daughter where I grew up because I grew up under those trees. Living, pulsing, patient trees. Where are they now?

What about the squirrels and birds who lived in those trees? And the people behind the windows? Children and old people and caretakers who couldn't stop the slaughter of the trees?

My parents don’t live on that street anymore. They live out in the country, in the woods. It’s a secret, where they live.

I’m never outside in dreams, always in houses, moving through rooms. I’m never in Outer Space—just Art Deco elevators, unknown eaves, dripping basements.