Posts Tagged Mother
I’ll Never Be Cured
My brain leaks,
just like my mother’s did,
my brain hurts,
I’ll never be cured.
They throw it back,
they give me shit,
my brain leaks,
I’ll never be cured.
My brain hurts,
just like my mother’s did,
she threw the black pans,
hailed our personal failures,
told us we’d never be good,
but I’ll never be her,
I’ll never ruin your psyche
My brain hurts,
just like my mother’s did,
my brain leaks,
I’ll never be cured.
The world hates,
It foams in my head,
with no smile,
I know I’m no good,
just like my mother said,
just like my mother said.
My brain hurts,
I’m scared of you all,
‘fraid I might crash,
you’ll see my soul crushed,
for my brain’s dead,
excepting total despair,
yeah, my brain hurts,
just like my mother’s did.
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Brahms, Revisited without Tears for Today
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Brahms, Revisited without Tears for Today
Brahms has the twitchy fuse,
lighting me in acidic
flames and the arguments inherited
from old elephants, between piano and orchestra,
are trudging – me, I verses the world,
and I’m losing
but I’m pounding the keyboard
until I get a break, a breath, a sigh,
and I show this grace
that is un-Brahms
but is
Brahms at his greatest,
and when the horns arrive
in red army coats, you know
victory is grasped with dirty,
dry, crisp finger nails, but it
never happens, never consummates.
I am finished, a heaping
pile of slippery dung
when Brahms is done.
And as a practicing drunk, the tears
would wilt tarnished cheeks and create heat
emanating around thorny eye sockets,
but these days are desert dry, pain layered
and hidden and only Brahms, only the
master knows, knows the truth, and now,
at least I rest, I stop, I pray, lost.
.
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p.s. – Embedded below is the referenced piece, performed by my favorite conductor and one of my favorite pianists. The exposition of the first movement lasts 3:45, so patience is needed in waiting for the arguments between piano and orchestra. The climax/recapitulation of the first movement at about 13:20 is one of the most intense sections of music I know along with the ending of the first movement. It is immense music. The third movement is a kick ass jam if you make it that far…
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The Beginning of My Story
On that day, the weather was sporadic as it might be in the midst of the vacant, listless September, the clouds like a giant casino, filling and emptying with the winners and the losers, but Mother hoisted a natural cheer so I had been left out in the modern rabbit cage, hanging above the dark oily alley with strewn garbage and broken bottles, braced to the window (my cage), centered by the breakfast table. At the fateful moment, the winds having begun to stir without Mother noticing, some sort of vigorous weather event having snuck up from behind and from within the crevices of the Brooklyn tenements, it was then that one torrent of furious air swept the ash-can-like planter filled with mildewed soil with the outgrowth of a blusterous and half-dead, lost-red, filtered to colorlessness, mini rose-bush off of the ledge of the patio on the outside of Ms. Stilldinger’s unit, 8B, two floors up, one over to the left. With a tremendous twirling velocity, it nailed my cage, blasting the fasteners, bouncing me out of the back of the cage, as then I felt myself tumbling in an unnervingly slow motion, bouncing rather than ripping the canopy above the cook’s entrance (the bounce attributable to my nearly-perfect mass of 22.5 pounds having flown from 6 floors up), the canopy covering the cook, Freddy, who having heard the pot blast my cage had moved out to look up beyond the canopy in time to catch me in an athletic manner after I had bounced diagonally on the third bounce. This certainly puzzled me on the tentative value of baby cages.
Some babies come to the world as new creatures, new creations, but some come from another life. Some are from another world. My mind is aware of the future world I am from where cars fly instead of rolling. I’ve come back here as punishment after hanging myself, as if I had not punished myself enough all the way through to my last day.
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Terror Bleeds White and Steals Love
The blue feels the white creeping,
stammering all over it. Perhaps
modern, blown lines, almost like ink,
the master of all for logical beauty,
Scarlatti sprinkles forks of death,
arriving through valleys in gutters.
underneath door jams, violent forks,
seething and slithering through the grinding
grout, grabbing bits of drywall, making
all appear destroyed by these punk offspring,
one who is strung out, as if by an Oak Tree,
with desperate chords that symbolize suicide,
starting in the purple of the stomach and vehemently
climbing as if a vine up these poisoned muscles,
throttling the neck, creating a flu of alien proportions,
creating the birth of the unknown guest,
depression, and the other sneaking to the kitchen,
because he innocently loves the cookies,
the other being so sweet to all of humans
despite the poisoning from Swanson’s,
green beans of rubber, and not intentional
hate, but love that will not cover him. Love
that leaves him on the side of the road,
pulling weeds, sucking on hay. The other is the
one, but a strange god was there, and the mostly-
full, gallon can of white ceiling paint tips warmly
and lovingly, and the one without love falls
with the cookies into a thick, fast-moving, syrupy
jelly, bloviating white – almost a river, and the
source of the Scarlatti stops, stomps slowly to see
what has been done, and screams, and screams, and
screams, while the one with flu hides in the corner
from the dirigible of scotch bottles which is blacking
out the love, and the one with flu is dragged by hair
to the accident scene, and then again, the screams,
and screams, and screams, and 11 pm, 1 am, 5 am,
bucket after bucket, as if it will never come back,
hell being this permanent scrubbing – scrub, you
bastard, you fucking asshole, scrub, scrub, and
the blue starts to feel blue again with the white
creeping while before the white was killing, killing,
and it was all of their tears, cleaning the white,
but not all the white, the tears not stopping because
they flow in these locations where there is no love,
and where there is none, there is scrubbing, and when
you asked me about hell, this is one of thousands
of places I thought of, places, events, devoid of love,
and they are everywhere. Do not open your eyes.
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Suffering the Reds and Blues of the Breakfast Room
Most times, I’m not grown
enough to sit by god,
and I eat in the kitchen,
the breakfast room, plastic
plates, no knives, and god
cannot share his will with me,
my brain still frozen blue,
the mean boys stuffing me
inside the red romper room
ball with the tough round handle
on top, cackling at my
deadly future.
I see the service
dog, the beautiful
Shepard sitting patiently
with his mistress, she loving
him delicately, awarding him
for his perfection, and I
say I wish I could be you,
boy, for I know the beautiful,
the loved, sit in the dining room
and luxuriate in god’s
will, in god’s kingdom.
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The Stranger Damaged George’s Soul Violently
George Torndawg walked into the heavy, melting bands of crosswalk. He was bedeviled by a sun that was hanging on to his nose with claws and punching him in the eyes and the forehead, regardless of which direction he slung his abdication. George Torndawg is rooting for a car, any car, to slam into him and malign him deeply down into the muckiest soup, the soup like his mother when she was sauced and watching fuzzies on television, but the traffic is far too slow. Furthermore, there’s no traffic today.
The reflective glass of the first floor curves with the plagued monster of a human creation in concert with the circle drive where the most hopeless patients might be dumped, and all of this first floor glass is shadowed by the overhang of the ethically-superior floors.
The glass is a hall of mirrors, blades and blades of sharp planes meant to shatter the ego, and then there is the man in the wheelchair with a ratty blue dog blanky with all sorts of holes, the blanky with holes. He, the man with the ratty blue dog blanky and slinky, oily, thin hair, is wearing slippers that should be retired, and when George Torndawg made a short glance at the man, the ropes of George Torndawg’s intestines plummet deeply, and he is suddenly longing for a gun that he could hold with two hands and point properly with the fullest of competence and the intensity of god. He is presently tasting the blue metal as it rests in his mouth.
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Freddy Is Sick – Section 6
You think we will never get Freddy out of his car, that his tortuous commute will never end, and that is what Freddy thinks every morning. Early mornings, it seems so smooth as if people are staying away from the highway so Freddy can have a smooth start to the day, but even then, sometimes he worries that the commute will never end. Freddy thinks he knows eternity. Eternity is worse on the way home.
Coming down 12th, Freddy will look at his car clock, two blocks before he gets to his terminus of layers and layers of concrete slab ready to collapse, and he will be amazed every time. It’s usually 20 minutes or 21 minutes. Such a short amount of time, but Freddy knows it is eternity. The bottom of the earth crawls around in his feet. The pressure on the braking makes him nervous during a majority of his descent to the bottom of the earth, and he wonders what is grinding away when he feels some sort of diminishing screeching of fur balls with ice of the metals.
Today, Freddy realizes that the world and all of the timeline that he perceives is a giant piece of music. He is stuck with defining his existence – Is he sporadic parts of the score, notes here and there with embellishing instructions on how he should be played, or is he an instrument, dutifully playing all of those notes, to the best of his ability, never perfectly, but good music cannot be perfect.
Being a portion of the notes of this massive, perhaps bombastic creation has a certain fatalistic feel to it. Freddy has no elective options in the mess. He is done by one instrument and then done by another, and the fascination is the resulting harmony of how he fits, perhaps sweetly, but likely not so sweetly because this, after all, is a bombastic creation. The rhythm is directed from the unknowable, the unseen source, and so Freddy bounces from this to that, spastic, manically, as if the events have the dotted, staccato markings, where no understanding is possible because the stay is so short, driven by a sense of time that is brutally harsh and frankly unfair, those notes that are heard in complex harmonies that are merely meant to aggravate in order for the listener to strongly desire that the music move forward in some perdurable fashion.
However this progresses, we know that even the indefatigable requires rest. This piece will never end. It seems to be played over and over again with different versions, contrasting like Toscanini vs. von Karajan, but it is sedulous and unending with trillions of layers of musicians from before, like Freddy’s Mother who is demonstrating how one put one’s entire back and shoulders into the most ecstatic chords that Brahms created for the piano, where in certain corners there are pianists who are tireless in their practice of certain phrases from Scarlatti, playing two bars of terribly feisty chords in higher octaves, meant to create tension briefly, being played over and over while a child acts out a sleep in a bed with soaked sheets from a feverish flu, longing to die quickly, but also there are those musicians from the future mixing in with all of these layers.
When it hits those resting spots, Freddy is landed as if in a pot of boiling chicken gizzards squirming and wrapping themselves around him, informing him that when his place is to serve as this note, as this part of the infinite piece, there will be no escape, that perhaps he will be boiling being choked by gizzards forevermore, the languid low D from the ending of a Shostakovich symphony, whereby when Shostakovich seemed interminable, he wasn’t, but Freddy is stuck in the undefinable permanent bottom cycle of depression, one that should allow for compassionate suicide, but Freddy is only this note or that note and here he has landed and is not allowed to die like a natural D would do in artful music – This is the music of life. This is how life is really a monstrous musical score devised by some deviant more hellish than Schoenberg.
Monkeys Torturing Diminutival Man
A sign hangs across my back,
a rope an aggravation around my neck.
Terrible posture, almost crawling, decrepit,
I search for people who can easily rip me apart.
(Because I can’t find any others.)
Signs are spat all over me in layers.
Evil monkeys come from all around, reading
instructions for how to tear down my spirit
and delete the hope, written by Mother
so many years ago.
Mother was thorough and the signs stick.
With heavy prayer, they were to stay under
my four-poster with balls of dreaded,
deadly dust and musky mattress bottom
which was well-known in all its deformities.
Defenseless water balloons, filled
with what was left of love, love in liquid,
running down pitiful, worn, shameful cheeks.
Monkeys, joyfully squeezing the balloons,
loving the pops, cackling,
blaring laughs from trombones.
Why could I not leave the instructions
in some desolate parking lot, in the rest area
off of I-70 where I camped to find out if I was alive
or if it was only the stars that were alive?
The stars blared at me,
and I ran, alive, ran away from humans,
but the signs stayed on me.
These monkeys have Mother’s spirit. One time
in hundreds through months, I feel that I’ve done
great things. No in-between for the other hundreds,
the monkeys gnawing and slashing
at what is left of my spirit, they know Mother’s tune.
How do they know?
From so far away,
from so long ago?
I struggle to be alive like the stars as I work
to slink the signs somewhere dark,
pulling the rope away,
but the monkeys know me and I can’t hide,
and they are slicing and dividing me
over and over
by two, until there seems to be nothing.
The liquid is almost gone.
My spirit is a tiny speck,
a fly under a humid mattress, begging for air.
Gentle with Pink Whale
Harry likes his pink whale.
I like Harry’s pink whale, too.
Harry mouths his pink whale
for hours like he wants to be
a mother. Confusion is whether
or not I want to have a pink
whale, too, or if I wish my
Mother would have treated
me like a pink whale. I had
a pink whale once. She’s still
cute as a bug but she’s grown
and doesn’t need me any more.
Opus 57
Born
down,
roughed up.
Enchanting
stories of music
penetrating deepest cracks of
holes in self made from Beethoven’s most ugly temper
simmering in baby blue bed.
Mother tears apart
confidence.
Drowning.
Red
seas.
