Posts Tagged The Prodigy
Dancing While Weeding
It’s what grown-ups do,
I tell myself,
but I’m no grown-up.
Yanking at weeds, shaving the lawn,
buzzing the bushes,
so everything is boxy.
It’s what grown-ups do
while sticking their chest out.
But I am a kid,
bouncing like a clown.
The Prodigy,
a blip from my war chest
of 8 Gig’s of MP3’s,
impetuous, silly
dance music,
blasts, erupts my brain,
and nothing else encroaches.
Surely causing old-age deafness,
but the price is so worthwhile.
Dancing, what kids dance to,
but I’m not slick.
I am in the mud
and lost in the suburbs.
As my body moves, I’m cognizant
of its intelligence, far more
vast than that in my skull,
I laugh at my grayness
as I contemplate where
I would be,
not wanting to be nagged:
Alone in a dark spot, being a child,
reading that day’s favorite book,
imagining having a life
as one of the beautiful
or even as one of the ugly,
but imagining having a life.
Berating myself,
prompting spiritual knowledge:
You don’t have a life;
you are life.
I am no life.
When a child, I am,
I am life as a child,
but when a grown-up,
faking grown-up might it be,
I have a life, more like have an
existence, a death,
but why do I resist
these things of grown-ups, why can’t I
accept my existence as an American
in 2011? Perhaps it’s those brilliant books
that poison me, that show me how foolish
it is to be grown up in a post-modern melee
of a shitfest, as my neighbor, Harold, assists:
he’s riding his fucking lawnmower,
his pale red, Sears Craftsman riding mower,
up and down the street.
No shit, up and down the street,
like he’s in the parade,
wearing his Safari hat, waving me over
to gossip, but my music’s too loud,
and I can’t interrupt my work,
and he fucked me over
about a tree, two years ago,
but I feel bad about my
anti-social sheen.
And a man, surely off-course
because he’s in a new, maroon Audi
nearly hits Harold,
but Harold waves,
like Hi there, Farmer John-
in-the-brand-new-Audi.
I push my cheapo mower
hopping donkey on my feet,
unusually not giving a shit
if the neighbors feel I’m cracked,
but feeling grown up,
feeling dead to life
like carbon fiber,
I’m proud of my boxy yard.
My Day in Six Words – XXV
Me,
The Prodigy,
dogs percolating crazy.
I Got the Poison
BOOM!
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
BOOM!
.
YYYEEAAAAHHH!
.
.
.
.
.
I got the poison.
.
I got the remedy.
Still got the poison.
.
BOOM!
.
.
.
YYYEEAAAAHHH!
.
.
.
Another tribute to those who only seem to keep me sane, The Prodigy.
Earlier: There was this.
Disco for the Insane
Suburban chores materialize depression.
Do them;
grown-ups do.
Towering snow banks intimidate today.
Selfish preservation wants the sun to work,
but others would think me lost.
I am lost; I am hiding,
but please don’t think me lost.
I will survive all of you people.
I have my contrivances.
I find garden gloves with summer soil,
grab my tiny music power box, ear buds on.
I will not crash.
YEEEEAAAOWW, The Prodigy –
I’ve got the poison, and
the remedy is The Prodigy.
YEEEEAAAOWW, making
Howard Dean seem like
the Queen of England.
I scream gigantically, and all is fine.
Neighbors are bottled against the cold.
Out of tune, big huge in spirit.
In summer, they called the hospital.
I was dancing with the lawn mower
in my baggy shorts, black socks
and tennis shoes from a nuclear winter.
They heard me screaming in joy.
I am embarrassing to all who love me,
but oh, if they let me out,
how I dance and survive,
how I survive the insanity
that hides in crevices,
wants me all gone,
makes me SICK,
wants me hanging from my Oak tree.
dancing with my bright red shovel,
my spirit is juiced, jacked
snow washing away, running away,
moving so good, so roundly nutty.
At the sight of our primitive dance,
the neighbor in Humvee,
mouth wide, astonished,
she wants to export me.
“You’re no good for me.”
I dance, The Prodigy sings loudly,
I hear all women I have known
singing this with the horn of a Honda,
a persistent beeping horn
for cracking brains open.
If you don’t like The Prodigy,
you will never tolerate my darkness;
you will see me as scrap for dogs;
you will work to obliterate my spirit.
“I got the poison, I got the remedy.”
If you take my Prodigy, the Oak tree
will master and destroy my good plans.
Is it true that only the insane,
only the forsaken love,
only they need The Prodigy?
Scene of the Crash
Normally, I am not one to provide background on a poem. I like them to stand on their own and I love the mystery of not knowing exactly what a reader will grab from the poem. I have learned many times that often with modern art, the art is more reliant on the audience than on the artist in a manner of speaking. Sometimes, although it feels very scary and out of control, the best reaction is to hear someone tell you what the piece said to them and you have no clue that you said anything remotely similar to what they received. Some will attribute the meaning they have received to God. I don’t know but I do like the mystery of it.
I decided to introduce this for two reasons. One is that it is perhaps yet another downer poem, but I want to provide information on the source, and two is the ability to give some credit to some musicians. On the first, since I have been on new medicines under my treatment with B2, I have gained a new disturbing side effect of daily depression cycles. I have been accustomed to ones that last only a few days but having ones within a day is strange, powerful and discouraging. We have tinkered with medicines and they are better than they have been. For a while, I could count on a huge crash into severe despair between two and four in the afternoon. This would occur at work or at home. At home, I could go to bed and sleep through it, but at work, I force myself to live through the agony. I try to live through it and I work hard to be my most normal. These crashes have been intense in the last few days and that is the place from which this poem comes.
On the second, I have loved the music group The Prodigy since the 90’s. They are a high energy club band, dance band, and most sane people think that they sound like wackos, and on the other hand, the music snobs, a group I belong in on occasion, believe that this is simple music, music for idiots. There is another group, a small group of people, who love this group’s music because of how it touches this radical part of our emotional complex. I don’t understand why, for there is no science to this, but I love it. As a matter of fact, this afternoon, I used some music from The Prodigy to work on pulling out of a crash and it was partially effective. This poem points to a song called, “Take Me To The Hospital.” (Please be sure to sample the video at the end to get a sense for the energy and madness.) I hear this song and it stirs up those feelings of knowing that there is nothing left and you need to quit and let someone lock you up. The title of the poem is part of a line from the song, “Welcome to the scene of the crash,” which feels perfectly apropos as I describe the scene of one of my afternoon crashes. Now I have blabbed on and on and maybe that is why I don’t like to give background. Pardon the interruption and here we go:
Scene of the Crash
I want life.
My mind zigs
In death’s egg noodle.
Take it away.
Please. Read the rest of this entry »
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