rock poetry, v3

Unemployment
(or Alt-Rock Orpheus)


Wait,
You’re already late;
What difference will it make
Now that the vaudeville
Set out on its way?

What will you do?
They won’t take you at the zoo.
All that make-up did no good,
You couldn’t look ferociously
Funny, furry or cute.

Sit still, you’ll spin a mental swirl,
Yeah, sure the bearded girl
Turned down your kiss, your dry lips
In daft careless contempt;
It’s her loss, really,
Don’t you think to make more
Out of a sordid episode;
Don’t fret, I’m afraid
You two won’t one day elope.

The freak show will continue,
In fact, they might soon need you
To replace the side-show;
All in all, I’d still wager
That you still hold in you
All one can humanly hope.

rock poetry, v2

Amy Winehouse



why does fucked up feel so fucking good?

full circle
the vice of the brevity of life
a bleak fife
the moon radiating raw miracle
the song of a syrupy skylark
soft alarm
pipes of disconcert drawing bee swarms
the ether dark

why does fucked up feel so fucking good?

longing lark
feathered love fight and blood fly by night
no not right
quite right too won’t do won’t strike the mark
sojourning in meadows of idyll cull
frayed flowers
flighty fracases fazed musings dour
tearful lulls.

why does fucked up feel so fucking good?

rock poetry, v1 (revised)

fuck

my fucking cellar door
turned out to be
a fucking stellar sore!

what fucking praise gave I,
springtime velvet,
fucked up, turned into lie!

did my fucking accent
not convey song?
translation accident.

bullshit. only my voice
will e’er flatter
so dross a fucking noise.

double hinged fucking board
of shitty wood,
fuck you! eat shit! I'm bored.

cellar door I’d adore,
affection fraught,
quiet denial in its core.


son of a bitch, what fucking whore...
(and no doubt I’ll go back for more.)

Jeff Buckley

when I listen to 'Grace', I can't help but feel haunted by Jeff Buckley's immense whisper of a voice; it is emotionally involving to the point of being distracting. When I listen to it I refrain from doing anything that requires a great deal of attention, because I'll simply drift into the melody and Buckley's croon.

but this is only now, over five years after I first purchased it. For a good part of these, I had to skip this album entirely when it came up, because, through none of the music's fault, I couldn't stand to listen to the first track, 'Mojo Pin'.

You see, the first time I cracked 'Grace' open and gave it a listen, I thought it was quite certainly some of the most beautiful music I'd ever heard. Buckley's singing is beyond the vast majority of singers' velour; vocally, he flies and wafts more niftly than a hummingbird. I, however, made a horrible freshman mistake in setting this CD in my stereo for it to play every morning as my alarm; I thought the sweet saddened tones on this album would soothe me out of sleep into a glorious awakening.

Of course, it is just a fact of modernity that an alarm will inevitably become just about the most obnoxious sound that one can hear. So using 'Grace' as my alarm made no difference in my mornings, and, in fact, ruined Buckley for me for a while.

But the point is, it is an album so beautiful that I would have liked to wake up every morning to the dreamy flux of emotion emanating from it; to feel the tragic fragility of grace permeate my ears. Buckley is a degree more sensitive to the precious and the magic in the world, more attuned to the wistfully fleeting; he manages to entrance with the dramatic beauty of his music.

just in case y'all didn't know.

poem: lonely at the beach

wave

Death becomes us,
Death becomes me.
A crab’s vacated shell
Grinds slowly into sand,
A thought this crustacean
Went solemnly without;
Sand that fed other shells,
sand makers in themselves,
that helped feed tidal seas
so once again they’d birth
fishy carcasses, me,
dunes of the sun-baked us.

poem: an unspoken whisper

[Note: Ideally, I would have liked for you who inspired this to have read it first; this poem is, after all, yours. I guess what I mean to say is, please forgive the lonely cowardice that gags my existence.]

to sb


Not the first time,
but the second –
then you had changed your hair,
shortened it, did something
that made it cease to hide
the unexpected class
I’d only vaguely suspected
I’d be surprised to find.

Only in notes
Writ to Nixe
in bad grammar, even worse prose,
silly intimacies, which said
that I wanted you to teach me
your language, to parse your
pursed lips as they pronounced
words I’d pretend to know.

Delicate Deutsch!
How very odd
that a guttural R
rings so divine
when it draws from your breath,
which never dared become
a moistened whisper then
from your mouth exhaled into mine.

Enamored,
masqued or not,
teach, but don’t touch,
five days a week
half past noon, in East Pyne,
I’d be so very close
as to learn longing subtlety
in a teutonic tongue.