pith…

Such a lovely song it aches. The Broken West, Like a Light (2007)

http://www.mergerecords.com/artists/brokenwest

I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On

I save the spaces.
No, I’m no bent surveyor
with a three-legged stare
bent on destiny, unsettled
by innominate expanses,
undone by an absence
of fences, parsing the plenty.
We know how that was
manifest. I’ve never been
enamoured of wrought
geometries and plaid
is a bad parody of place.
I save only the spaces:

triangulate spans between
the bridge trusses where
swallows play no-touch tag,
the cracks under windows
where the wind wriggles in,
those gaps around the sink
where prehistoric beetles
pass like Hermes from world
to world, lulls in a song
where notes go to compose
themselves, the fissures
in a hammerhead stamped
out from tempered metal.

I make a man inhabit
the middle of this room
and wait to arrange nothing
but occasions to empty.
When he’s finished shaping
a proper container, we carry
slim air where it’s needed:
for earthquakes or murders,
to bend the paths of bullets,
to reverse the sad collapse
of width. Yes, I guess
I have to catch him first.
A space is a saving.

.

- joesmith
© 2010

I

Here in the town of the common and the good,
only the flashes reach us. There’s no thunder
rumble, no sound to savor, no low music
to score the out-of-favor soul. No, first
it’s the din, carried air away east, then rain
broken in waves on main street curbs
where urges are nearly two blocks long.

Homines urbis mundi,
park in the lines diagonally.
Turn right or left one-way
at the pagoda that would be green.

At the Pix they’ re playing last year’s winner
of something like a fig leaf, somewhere in France.
A yo-yo in the hand of the boy on the bike
who ups and downs for most the day, metal playing
in his head and a knack, at ten, for squaring
every stimulus. Not much to do for the dudes
at Dave’s Music. They swap names of shared lays,
grow their hair pretty long and each one knows
where the other one lives.

Before the show, tattoos for all.
The low whir of the master
inking permanence to your arm.
We need this town
like you need that tattoo,
a black widow you designed yourself
for Bill the Renaissance Needle to etch.
An artist, says the ‘Nam vet
with the vulture on his knee.

II

A caudal of the flocked
hum hymnals to the wind,
grace notes for toothless grinding,
communal gurgles for the state.
We barter our hearts like borrowed garments
and run to each other as slow-mo lovers
in a misfed reshoot of a colorized film.

The town’s name came from their language,
not the painted faces, not the pox, nor
the slaughter, never the whooping fans of earth.

We must please the unseen
keepers of grids that plot
our soddled odds and finagled
every street. We watch parabolas
fall up across the sky, a tired arc
as rising star, as arbitrary schism
between ground and zero aim.
We’re gods, goddammit, less
their distant entertainments.

- joesmith

.

Copyright, joesmith. Please.

“It was intelligence and nothing else that had to be opposed.” – Søren Kierkegarrd

The wind is against me
on my pedaled way to work.
A bus almost clips me
cutting in to its shelter at the curb.
A Benz would prefer to run the light
and me over to waiting one second more.
The finger inside shows off its white
length behind smoked sloped glass. Every car
would rather rattle my irksome bones
across the avenue (like bar dice slammed out
of their leatherette cup) than notice
I’m next to naked without their metal
to enfold me. I am only sure
that winter will be worse and that words
meant to comfort are drab impostures.

The wind again is against me
all the chilled way home. A horn
reminds me how much I need
a light to flash my presence. (More
would, of course, be better, but the bushes
here, if they burn at all, burn away to ashes.)
But I remember you said you had a “crush”
on me and I begin to wonder in spite
of the wind and the traffic and the cynic
on my bike how old is too old to feel like
a first-kissed kid getting red in public.
I can’t help but think this
Spring might arrive a week or so early
or listen when you tell me “It’s o.k. It’s O
K.” I can even believe you mean each letter.

.

joesmith

Alert as the light that changes color
with the weather atop the building
some mistake as electric, we’re mingling
our blood and juices without the dolor
that ought accompany a great big age
of disease. We are lovely here and welcome
the change we bring to each brown room.
In the phone booth, we tear our pages
from the musclebound book, feeding each
to the other our spare and crinkled names.
Ecstasy is this and we, we are sudden
and hairy on the fair political body.
We’re slick in the acidic rain, slippery
as a morning mood. We bite and wrestle
like wiry otters, loving mud and burning
wet without a stick of weathered wood.

.

joesmith

A bromide? Maybe. Maybe not.
“What we call basic truths are simply the ones we discover after all the others.”
- Albert Camus, The Fall

The more that “success” requires self-promotion, the interested I become in approaching it.

Collecting innumerable surfaces.
Stacking them, madly, into layers.
For digging further. As required.

“We thought it was a unique, and wonderfully musical, name.”

Your daughter, Chlamydia, may disagree.

What one puts here, right here, may, indeed, be a reality, of a sort, one’s choice of re / presentation. For oneself. Or: others. Or, a mix.

It’s hard to be picky about what one touches in this world when the world comes in as daily tidal waves, washing you on along with it.

“Alas, after a certain age, every man is responsible for his face.” – Albert Camus, The Fall

Calling in the Context Abatement Unit.

“To cease being doubtful, one must cease being, that’s all.”
- Albert Camus, The Fall

Style may indeed express substance.
If you ignore fashion.

New project: Translate, adapt & update Albert Camus’s “La Chute” for contemporary stage. That’s sure to be a big hit.

“When one has no character one must apply a method.”
- Albert Camus, The Fall (La Chute)

In an Age of Attention,
amid mass attempts to take
a stage, poets may be the last
to understand. Or the first.

1 in 4 Americans have a mental disease.
The other 3 are sick from thought.
1 in 2 have a broken part of some sort.

“Make up your mind,” they say.
Believe me, they, I’ve been trying,
my damndest, to make a mind up
for many years. You want it to sit.