2011/09/26

Or Faith, Strange to Feel in That Zoo of Manners





I understand the circle-jerking in honor of the 20th anniversary of the release of Nevermind even if I think Nirvana the most over-hyped band since the last until the next (though credit Cobain for ensuring it's legacy by killing himself - as with Joplin, Hendrix, motherfucking Morrison, ask yourself: if they hadn't died the young genius' romantic death, had they sobered and lived and produced inevitably lesser and self-derivative music, then, at fifty, sixty, to keep the checks coming, played Wolftrap for old farts, whither their sainthood? It's an old question, asked without malice.).

I don't hate Nirvana (I don't lurch for the radio to change stations when Nirvana comes on like I do for The Motherfucking Doors) any more or less than I hate, say, Ernest Hemingway or Raymond Carver, though holyfuck, I hate the motherfucking swarms of shitty imitators they all spawned, which is to say while I may not like Nirvana I need be even smaller than I already am not to acknowledge their influence.

I do, however, like Bryan Ferry, who was born sixty-six years ago today, and I love Roxy Music (all line-ups), which is in the permanent inner-rotation for the remaining three spots of five in my sillyass desert island game.





















GO GREYHOUND

Bill Hicok

A few hours after Des Moines
the toilet overflowed.
This wasn't the adventure it sounds.

I sat with a man whose tattoos
weighed more than I did.
He played Hendrix on mouth guitar.
His Electric Ladyland lips
weren't fast enough
and if pitch and melody
are the rudiments of music,
this was just
memory, a body nostalgic
for the touch of adored sound.

Hope's a smaller thing on a bus.

You hope a forgotten smoke consorts
with lint in the pocket of last
resort to be upwind
of the human condition, that the baby
sleeps
and when this never happens,
that she cries 
with the lullaby meter of the sea.

We were swallowed by rhythm.
The ultra blond
who removed her wig and applied 
fresh loops of duct tape
to her skull,
her companion who held a mirror
and popped his dentures
in and out of place,
the boy who cut stuffing
from the seat where his mother
should have been—
there was a little more sleep 
in our thoughts, 
it was easier to yield.

To what, exactly—
the suspicion that what we watch 
watches back,
cornfields that stare at our hands,
downtowns
that hold us in their windows
through the night?

Or faith, strange to feel
in that zoo of manners.

I had drool on my shirt and breath
of the undead, a guy
dropped empty Buds on the floor
like gravity was born
to provide this service,
we were white and black trash
who'd come
in an outhouse on wheels and still

some had grown—
in touching the spirited shirts
on clotheslines,
after watching a sky of starlings
flow like cursive
over wheat—back into creatures 
capable of a wish.

As we entered Arizona
I thought I smelled the ocean,
liked the lie of this
and closed my eyes 
as shadows
puppeted against my lids. 

We brought our failures with us,
their taste, their smell.
But the kid
who threw up in the back
pushed to the window anyway,
opened it 
and let the wind clean his face,
screamed something 
I couldn't make out
but agreed with
in shape, a sound I recognized
as everything I'd come so far
to give away.




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