Moment of Silence

Three

A slight man, tall, bespectacled, his lips drawn tight as the harmonies he sketches nightly, stooped over the falling-apart piano in his Aunt Ruth's parlor room, a stranger among the velvet drapes and crystal figurines. When she fades to sleep on the rumpled loveseat, he will rummage through the guest room closet, search out the summer dress his mother borrowed on a visit decades back, lace his taut arms through the shoulder straps, and waltz solo through the creaking hallway, far away from home. In two hours, Ruth will wake predictably, and he, now in a threadbare robe, will lead her to bed, with hands gripping her arms' loose flesh, his sharp nose bent into her head of drowsy curls.

The Fall

A month-old dream: Saul, a man (who in waking hours) I'd banished from my house, a man whose disrespect spat out of him in all directions, a toady to my enemy, showed up unexpectedly in the brown duplex where I was born. The dream's details are furry, but I distinctly remember his smug lippy smile and the way he danced pennies across his knuckles. Also, his Protean ability to endlessly alter physical form. Of course, I know that if you chain a shapeshifter, his form will solidify, and you can force him to foretell the future.

But I didn't want the future. As he turned into a chipmunk to scamper away, I caught him by the neck, displaying my quarry to Ilena. She flashed her one-sided smile, vaguely pleased. Turning, I threw his body sharply into a porcelain tub, and as a circle opened on his furred back and began spilling brown blood, Ilena grimaced, "he's only a creature," and left me to watch alone as the pool of brown fanned out around his pygmy corpse.

*****

Friends, even the person you hate most turns out ultimately fragile. Even this crusted shell I secrete to circle my own form eventually cracks, revealing me pink inside, and shivering. Are my black spells working? I want to take them back. I want to fold them away and forget them.

A word I spoke in mischief came through, not by my hand but by chance, and now I sit like a man who mistakenly crushed a bird trying to carry it, staring at the enormous hard-knotted hands that betrayed him. Enough obliqueness, though: our former roommate's cat has run away.

Snowscape

For Ryan

Sipping my evening chai in the now-brilliantly-silent sitting room, I pick up an old copy of Poetry magazine, a castoff I fished out of the co-op free box years back. I come across Billy Collins' selection standards for Best American Poetry 2006, a frank criteria that seems inoffensive--if not particularly inventive--until I come across the death blow: "no poems containing the word cicada." This with a freshly minted piece on my bedside which opens "Cicadas kamikaze down/ the torn screen door." And even though I realize that my hastily scribbled sketch isn't destined for Collins' desk, or any desk other than my own, and even though (or perhaps precisely because) I realize that my use of "cicada" is occasioned by the very notion Billy Collins opposes--poets choosing words on mouthfeel alone--I take a train to Billy Collins' house and kill him. Not with any relish, mind you. I just dispose of him quickly with a swipe of my Uncle Mack's butterfly knife and head back to the train station, where the urgent song of a perfectly-placed cicada swarm cleanses my thoughts.

Thinly Veiled

Dismissed from my post at the local rag, I fire off an early-morning missive that stretches into midafternoon. Satisfied that I've skewered the chumps, I strut around my newly acquired empire and echo laughter into the absence. Silence descends. The squatters are gone. Only their filthy footprints remain.

Soundtrack

Trust me, you need this:



Listen to the tunes.
Watch the video.
Download the album.
Purchase the discography.
Thank me later.

Oh, and ignore this review:

Ready the incendiary RJD2 into the revolver. Aim discriminately at a brooding Dmitri Shostakovich sampling the elusive Prefuse 73. Fire across the bows of a rewound Johann Sebastian Bach before ricocheting past Boom Bip, and you'll fast forward upon the man John Peel shot the breeze about until he sneezed.

Roll the tape for: layer upon layer of rhythms and melody; Eskimo glockenspiels; cut-from-scratch chemistry peeking through a shadowy keyhole.

Iron Out San Francisco will leave you rooting around in the wrought iron daisies growing under your feet. It might well affect you profoundly [...]

Dream Fragments

We thought we were superheroes of music. Really, we were just dudes with underwear on the outside of our clothes. Later, we would try to save the world by downloading the perfect album, but it wouldn't decompress properly and we'd sift through internet message boards all night long trying to find it. Like superheroes.

Sam and I filmed a warm-up set on tour, and the next thing we know, we had a dutch label "highly interested." They released a sampler DVD throughout Europe, and there I was at Chapter 3, shorts unzipped, my belly and breasts hanging out as I gesticulated ridiculously and performed embarrassing freestyles in front of a Hawaiian backdrop. Eventually all three rappers exposed their penises in sequence and the video cut to disturbing asian porn, seamlessly, in a way that made us laugh before the close-ups.

Turned out it wasn't a drumset at all, just a pile of toms, tambourines and cymbals shoved in the corner of a dingy room. All the instruments were like that--banjos and guitars just necks connected by rusty strings to their disassembled bodies.

Inaugural Address

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