Cymbal #54:: Under the Willows

You lit into me like ten thousand candles. The soft fleece the moon was wrapped in caught fire, and burned silently. Its ash rained through the world. Oh love, you pulled no punches. Your fingers in my mouth were casual like I was an old chipped inkwell you owned.

K.Flay – Blood in the Cut - 2017

 

You broke something, darling, and you know it. You broke that dam in me which held back a boiling wave. You reached into a thing that I thought was dry, and destroyed its borders. What gushed through like floodwater was brown and dirty, incoherent and foaming. Love is horrible, love is a dog from hell, the man said, drooling and red eyed. It has the power to make you feel ugly in your own sight. It makes you want to break mirrors. It has the power to bring you to your knees time and again. It can paint a face on you, a broad cherry lipped smile, teary eyes, jealous, blinking in the wind. 

Van Morrison – You Don’t Pull No Punches but You Don’t Push the River – 1974 

What could be sadder than that stock character? What could be more pantomime – already written into comedy thousands of years ago? And having mocked them all the years through, clapped and jeered, here I stand in exactly that paint, on a stage, staring into the lights. It smells like chalk dust. The world snaps at my ankles. 

It rained all the end of the year, and the leaves were beaten off their branches. I lived by the river, in the rushes, kneeling with the beasts. But I know one day I will wake up, the year will have turned, I will be standing by the water, it will be running and I will not be thinking about you. The greatest thing in life, says the river, is to reach for something with all your flayed and naked heart and fail. And the most overrated, whispers the willow, is to win it.

Cymbal #53:: Pompeii

Last night, you were with me again, those equal halves of your face like the bow of a ship on my chest. I was surprised to see you but not inordinately, and you explained your presence somehow, and I believed you. I rested in us, and there was so much that had passed that you needed to know but it was enough tonight that you were still alive and in this, my world. Somehow you too were a dozen years older, in little ways. Your hair fell on me as it used to; your familiar hips. 

Then I woke up and I washed my face and looked into my eyes and even the image was vanishing, was going around the screens in my mind, was gone. I was alone again with my eyes; deep and ringing as a well, good to swallow all of me whole. I could disappear like you. 

R.E.M. – Country Feedback – 1998 (with Neil Young)

What I know now is no good to me. I know if ever I found myself in splendour again, the sun on you and I sparkling, the days running easy, if ever I had control again, if ever I had a line on the lodestar, I know I would not cash out of anything. I’d push in all my chips, and fall straight into the future. 

Pink Floyd – Echoes – 1971

Imagine this – here David is again, forty five years later, in Pompeii of the ashes. This is the first public performance in that theatre since the gladiators two thousand years ago. He is here now without Roger Waters, who has not been around for thirty long years. Without Richard Wright, whose fleetfoot traceries were so much of the Pink Floyd sound. The song they are playing is for recently dead, but long lost, Syd Barrett. An old man in a shaft of milky light, singing a song for the departed, on a sacrificial altar. 

David Gilmour – Shine on You Crazy Diamond – 2016 

Is this not what it means to be human – forever enacting what came before us? I’m here in the half light, and the film of the past is so thin in my fingers. Holding it up to the light, watching life in reverse. I cannot take my eyes off it. I would be this man again. Who would we be without our own cursed magnetic histories? 

[Note: During the great quarantine of 2020, Pink Floyd put some of their legendary live concerts out on YouTube, to encourage people to stay home. There was famously no audience in 1971, at the “Concert for the Dead”, a truly spectral performance.]

Cymbal #52:: Praying for Rain

Tied to the bed of spikes, he is now only in thirst. His tongue scrapes over his teeth, rasps against his lips, sticks to the roof of his mouth. There is no moisture he can bring up any more. Now we wishes only for rain, imagines it filling his mouth, drop after delicious drop, gulping it down, too much of it. Rain so thick and sweet. 

And what of it, if it kills him? 

They tied him to the bamboo frame yesterday, and then they left. Good men, simple men, men with compassion in their eyes. It is always good and simple men, doing a job, going home to their families. The one who bound him down nodded to him before he left. They would not see him again. 

With his hands he had done things that were no lighter. 

John Frusciante - Central - 2009

Think of the rate of growth – he thinks of all the bamboo under him, rustling with promise. Every day, three centimeters more of it, and it has to go somewhere. If it must, then it must go into him, break through his parchment skin, draw the thick blood from him, penetrate his organs, enter the cage of his heart. All of that promise is sleeping. Waiting ceaseless for the rain to push verdant and green into the upper air. Here he lies humming, suspended between the earth and the canopy of the jungle. 

People need things, he thinks. They need water and they need vitamins and they need clothes for the children and they need to see the party they vote for win once in their lives and they need to see a perfectly round yellow moon. Sometimes, people need to see the person who hurt them punished. Which is why he is here, and he needs water. 

Grant Lee Buffalo - Happiness - 1994

The whole world is thirsty. The ants are thirsty, and the worms, and rats and the snakes, whispering in the forest under him, also waiting for the rain. Nothing is thirstier than the bamboo that holds his world together. He is thirsty for water, but he is also thirsty for this immense green engine to move forward, for the sun to come down over the thicket where he lies, for the cicadas to cry out their song. Everything must rest in the end. 

Pain is only the thinnest skin of consciousness. Deeper than pain and pleasure is need. Under need moves a thing only torturers know, that quiet motive force that chooses to come and go. 

So he prays for rain.

The Profane - Review in The Hindu

I was very happy to see this review of The Profane by Mr. Keki Daruwalla in The Hindu on Sunday Oct. 13, 2018.

I will try to be less run of the mill in the future :-)

It's here!

New Poems - Literateur

The Literateur published 'Your Demons', 'New Years Day, 3AM' and 'Kaleja' this last weekend.

Cymbal #51:: Ghosts of the Twentieth Century

Lost somewhere in the back alleys of the twentieth century is a hotel. The carpet at the reception is worn down towards the counter. There's a bowl of hard candy resting on it. The wood paneling has started peeling at the corners. Keys hang from a board behind the receptionist, a kind ghost in a white jacket with watery eyes. 

In a room up the stairs, Papa Hemingway has just filled a glass with rum and ice, his hairy fist closing on the crystal cubes. He's sitting in his towel, like a fat bear, his back still wet. A chain hangs around his neck. 

On the fire escape, Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith are eating an orange. They are thinner than thin and hipper than hip. She is holding him, and he growing ghostlier. He is more shirt than man now. Soon, only she will remain, holding his scent in her nose. 

Leonard Cohen - Chelsea Hotel No. 1 - 1972

Down the corridor, a woman is sitting on the edge of a bed, putting her pants back on. Her lover lies cheek down, watching her. He is already writing the poem. He will write it now, he has written it already, he will write it five years from now. He will rewrite it. Over time the last thing he writes and records will replace all the drafts in his head. It will replace his memories of that afternoon as well. 

Greg Dulli - Paper Thin Hotel - 2012

(Leonard Cohen Cover)

I was there too, running for the money and the flesh. Then, that year, the entire mountain fell on me, the unbearable entirety of human despair. I saw the light of the universe flicker, saw how little life there was in all. Up till then, I had believed in death by flame. For the first time, I saw that death could come from slow extinction, from suffocation, from a lack of desire. That I could die equally of patterns in traffic, the slow movement of clocks, that I could die equally of disinterest.

There's a man in the little room by the laundry chute whose face is flames. He never stops hammering away at his typewriter. He's been typing for weeks. One day the spell will break, and the flame will go out and he will eat and he will sleep, like a mortal. What the rest of us would not give to be him - to be imbued by purpose, to be burning like gas from a jet. 

Leonard Cohen - Who by Fire - 2010 (Live)

This is why, in the morning, everybody in the hotel, even the man who is on fire, comes to the courtyard to look at the fish.  They put on clothes, nudge their lovers and walk down the stairs. The fish swim in their nectar - they have no age, they cannot die. We can only touch the water and hope. And I who have no hope from this burnt year, I watch all the ghosts of the century anoint themselves.