The mystery of the Trinity
That’s the crucial item
In our doctrinal curriculum

And doesn’t your feast day fall during Lent

Here’s me at seven years old
I’ve adopted the habit of running indoors
Whenever a plane flies overhead
A frequent event in the suburb of a city
It seems I spend a lot of time outdoors

Grownups claim though they offer no evidence
That I have nothing to fear
But I have seen the pictures
Of the planes and the atom bombs
And I know that I must duck and cover

The poem in the act of coping
With a glut of depletion
In the act of collecting residue
To assemble into a new
Something

For our newness is assemblage
And not the creation of objects from nothingness
So was it ever but now
Standing atop this repository of corruption
The hoarseness of a howl
The vagueness of a vision
The weightlessness of a sensation
And all mass surrenders to abstraction

Seen of but few
Concealed from the Goat King
Who smokes a cigarette in his Audi

The play has wound down
Done the denouement
Finished the epilogue
The usher sweeps the plastic cups
And we stack them in pyramids

The voice of a decadent age will be decadent
Though some custodians of the regular style
Will persist
Graduates of the programs
But despite their noble efforts
They will not serve as voice

Our memories are distorted
Our expectations small
Though we know a lot of things not taught in schools
Of urges and delights not spoken of
Of violence and disgust not spoken of
We know next to nothing
But there is so much in next-to

Pompous no doubt
Pretentious assuredly
But redolent of a certain askesis
Amid the parasites and the copulating monkeys

Democracy morality aesthetics
These are ideals
And those who speak of them idealists
And we live as you know not in an age of ideals
But of successes
And we who fail can see more clearly
Than whose whose sight is veiled
By little luxuries little appetites little tyrannies

I react anxiously to modal auxiliary verbs
The preposition of gives me the heeby-jeebies
And about is no picnic
Pronouns present themselves as a constant source of danger
With relative pronouns among the worst
And don’t get me started on I

Here’s me at eight years old
I’m going to hell
That’s the way it is
But I can avoid this terrible thing
By just confessing my sins
I know I have lots of them
Grownups people who know
Are always telling me
To stop being bad and start being good
But I can never think of sins to confess
They tell me I’ve done a bad thing
And I see what they’re talking about
But when I examine my conscience
I can only remember getting yelled at
So sometimes I pad my time
In the confessional
With fictions
Delinquencies thefts acts of violence
Such as I can imagine
And they are more or less true in a general sense
No the real catch
The real damning provision
Was slipped into the Act of Contrition I recite daily
A firm purpose of amendment
I wish to amend
But I fail at firm purposes
And the fear of condemnation
Albeit an already accomplished fact
Exceeds both the conceivable pain of punishment
And the conceivable relief absolution would afford
For eternity cannot be conceived
Nor the shame of one condemned
Some time in the future I will ask
Why does God who loves me
Send me to hell
And the answer will return
Ah but you send yourself to hell
With your unrepentant depravity
Oh but I do repent
I do repent

How can this life be gone
So rich so variable
So full of incident
Madly overflowing with superfluous detail

People can accommodate themselves
I’ve seen it
My father so pleased that I’d arrived
He’d been in pain
But morphine made it stop somewhat
He’d begged for morphine
Who’d been blown up in World War II
And I knew that he knew
Bravest of men
Otherwise he would have never suffered such indignity
As to beg

So many memories
And yet when I survey them
So many traumas
So many disappointments
I’ve done some begging in my time
Who am not brave
But then my death isn’t imminent
No more than usual anyway
Maybe I’ll feel differently
As I feel the time draw near

But you can go at any time
Can’t you
And then
Just nothing

Sorry about the lack of images
This just isn’t a visual experience
This isn’t entertainment
Sorry about the lack of rhetorical flair
Other poets speak more artfully than I
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff
Something of significance to leave behind
Where I can’t find it

That unthinkable nothingness
That repulsive absence
To be aware now of being unaware
Unaware unbeing
The icy hand’s encroachment
That’s nothing to

Don’t be nostalgic for the individual
Already so dividual
When we say we go
We mean we go somewhere
Not gone therefore
Not departed
No mere relocation
Not forgotten
Just nothing

The rest of the world will still exist
As it has existed before
Worlds end and other worlds begin
Other worlds

Death is death
Go to hell St. Paul

It doesn’t give permission
This mortality
To treat yourself badly or anybody else
Some people say they have it figured out
I doubt that they do
But it doesn’t give you license to punish

On the contrary
It enjoins the opposite
You must be kind

Again I see myself
On the old boat
Or is it a bus
Laden with the naked
The bewildered
Just as we were when we lived
The ones who forgot how
The ones who die as drooling children
No arrival no destination no eventful journey
Always only the setting out

Two branches up
And then flight to the tallest pine

O fine little finch
Pale gold
Strong to break away

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kim96-B_udc&list=OLAK5uy_lORM1ruWnL8i5rTweDk6fM7kF1LWeQWvw

Salt Marsh
When you’ve put aside your creamy candies
Follow the forbidden road
Past the crummy asphalt land
To where the salty rushes grow
The web of roots and rhizomes
Grassblood tangle of weeds and palmetto
The slicing sawgrass fingers
Risky region of fish and mosquitoes
Sand will reach each crease and crevice
Sulfur seasons rack your bones
Can’t you see you don’t belong here
Can’t you see you’re not at home
The wading birds complaining
Moonsong heard where the tides are receding
Ominous sounds of water
Go now leave the invertebrates breeding
Here everything its place of birth
Here everything returns to earth
Here uncanny peace and strife
Go live your little human life
Birth and death must not surround you
These extremes are not your call
Fish and fowl and worm deny you
Seek the comfort of your hall
The smell of decomposing
Tread not here where the bugs are prolific
Boot sucks up marshmud bubbles
Tombgas primitive scent of placenta

Say Ok
One night I was walking cross the Main Street Bridge
I found out I wasn’t walking cross the Main Street Bridge
Well the river down below me was a television image
For the white caps on the water you can hardly see the waves
The algorithm measures and predicts its spiky shape
In the frantic operation comes a message for the age
It says straighten up and say that you’re OK
Everything is telling me that I’m OK
Everything is telling me that I’m OK
Everything is telling me that I’m OK
And a chilly cold wind started up to blow
Such a cold cold wind will chill you to the bone
Yes and when the flakes start falling and you can never never go home
On a nonexistent channel how they hit the icy slopes
You can’t help but see a pattern in the random swirling snow
Those perfect healthy bodies gonna show you what to know
They say join the fun shut up and say OK
Everything is telling you &c. Say OK say OK say OK
See the children dancing regimented dancing
Regulated elbows regulated knees
Well the screen is colder than the icy slush
Nevermore to feel the warmth of your mother’s touch
Never get enough you’re getting getting too much
Oh the smallest things invisible are focused tuned and aimed
The planets and the stars they are commissioned bagged and weighed
The Hitler Youth for Jesus are holding a parade
They say get in line shut up and say OK

Lying Crying
I saw you lying on the floor I saw you crying on the floor
I saw you lying lying crying lying on the floor
That’s when I knew you swore you’d never love me no more
I heard you talking in your sleep I heard you walking in your sleep
I heard you talking talking walking talking in your sleep
That’s when I knew you’d never never be mine to keep
Don’t leave me don’t leave me can’t you see I love you so
Please need me please need me I need to never let you go
I saw you haunting in the night I saw you flaunting in the light
I saw you haunting haunting flaunting in the lights at night
I knew that never again would everything be alright
I love you I love you I don’t know what else I can say
I love you I love you I hate to see our love decay
I’m breaking up it’s breaking up
I’m breaking down we’re breaking up
You just don’t need me

Acrid Putrescence
I detect a baleful presence and it’s something you can smell
Witness thou the rising essence of a disgusting tale to tell
Never mind your childish preference you have joined the judgment sessions
Just as you surmise rising to the skies whiff your own acrid putrescence
On the day of your pubescence when the big decay sets in
Then begins your acquiescence in the dire wages of sin
Behold my obsolescence long since my adolescence
The world I knew so fair and new filled with acrid putrescence
There’s a sparkling iridescence to the fragrant rotting meat
Destiny of foul excrescence to the tasty food you eat
I prefer the moony crescents to sunshine’s incandescence
That opens near so stark and clear the world’s acrid putrescence
All life requires corruption to survive
All life needs putrefaction thus to thrive
So spread the swine manure on your lawn
You too will feed the grass when you are gone
It’s an age of decadescence
There will be no Christmas presents
Gobble down anti-depressants
As you sink into senescence
Feel your body’s deliquescence
Lounge in languid convalescence
And indulge your fat tumescence
Having learned the painful lessons
Of your cheesy concupiscence
You can see the luminescence
Like a blinding phosphorescence
Of the fateful omnipresence
Of your own acrid putrescence

In the Loop
You’re in the loop her wicked loop
Orbit her planetary purpose
You’ll kiss the boot jump through the hoop
Join in her soul-decaying circus
She’s got the noose around your neck
Now you can flop upon deck
Now feel all humble-ing sensations
She’s got the key to all your woes
She got the ring piercing your nose
Disciplinary exaltations
You’re in the loop her wicked loop
Now she controls your life’s direction
One of the group one lazy scoop
She’s added you to her collection
Now let us teach you how to pray
Now let us school you what to say
Now you must beg for her to like you
Now that she’s got you on your knees
Worship her fearful symmetries
Hands on each side ready to strike you
Behold her minions in a row
Behold how we put on the show
Enter and exit at her pleasure
No need to kick and raise a fuss
Now you belong as one of us
One little jewel in her treasure

Losing My Voice
Think I got a blown speaker in the back seat of my car
I can hear it shake I can can hear it rattle
I hear the shivering sounds but I can’t bear to name what they are
When they’re accusing me of negligent excess
I don’t bear burden any time I make a mess oh
But I know it’s just a symptom
A speaker only answers to the signal that it gets
That’s how you know machines they know exactly what you’re thinking ah
I think I’m losing my voice I think I’m losing my voice
I must have sung it too loud I think I’m losing my voice
Now one of the things you won’t be hearing me sing about
Is my personal feelings on emotions
On the subject of the passions I can nevermore speak out about
How you might wish they would evaporate
Lose their effect on you and merely fade away oh
And let you feel alright
Even though you know it’s just a lie
Let you forget it when you made somebody cry
I think I’m losing &c.
A singer like me don’t need to spend a night out in the rain
If he wants to catch a case of laryngitis
He knows a quicker way to reach the bliss of vocal strain
He’s just gotta be a aware how he’s hanging out
Everybody knows exactly what he’s all about
He ain’t got no secrets
He ain’t got nothing nobody needs
And anybody listening out there knows that it’s a fool you see
I think I’m losing &c.

Torna (Falling)
You may find yourself yearning
To the earth to be returning
For the rest you have been earning
All the days you’ve been awake
While the day is calmly ending
Nightfall gently is descending
Light and dark lusciously blending
Mingled fragrances ascending
Toward decline your thoughts are tending
Old Decay you are befriending
To him songs of love you’re sending
Quiet breath away to take
Do not think you’re leaving
No one here is deceiving
Let be no grieving
Do not fear falling down
All of the bridges they are falling down
The London bridges they are falling down
And all the bridges down in Jacksonville are falling falling falling down
All of the skyscrapers are falling down
All of the palaces are falling down
Don’t give your heart and soul to things material things falling falling down
And all the lovely things are falling down
And all the ugly things are falling down
And all the secret things you covet falling falling down

Make It, Dirty
It’s a mighty long road
The world is old and getting old
And this country’s seen enough to make a blind man walk
Yeah we’re living in a junk pile
But there’s a rhythm in a junk pile
You got plenty here to make what all the hell you want
Pretty soon I’m going to tear this building down
And every time I see the sun go down I’m going to dance and howl
And sing make it dirty make it dirty
Tell me a story and make it dirty
Take a good old song and break it up
The feeling will find a way
Don’t you love that woman dancing over there
She’s dressing out like the county fair
She got lights all around her and her mood ring glow
She’s put together like a royal crown
She won a million in the lightning round
She was in the paper on the counter at the grocery store
Pretty soon she going to make her lights go out
And every time I see the sun go down I’m going to dance and howl &c.
Making something out of something else right now
And every time I see the sun go down I’m going to dance and howl &c.

Not Just Any

The dish not just any dish ran away with the special spoon
Not just any spoon ran away with the dish
My love not just any love ran away with the special guy
Not just any guy ran away with my love
Not just any not just any you’ve got plenty you can choose
Not just any not just anything will do
Something special just don’t settle for just any
Not just any not just any not just any
The cat not just any cat sat upon the special mat
Not just any mat was sat on by the cat
My life not just any life isn’t worth a special damn
Not just any damn is not worth my life
Not just any &c.
I I I I not just any I feel like I’m fixing to special die
Not just any die I feel like I’m fixing to
Not just any &c.
The end not just any end of the song is the special this
Not just any this is the end of the song

Word Talking
I am word talking man I am word talking man
I got words louder than actions gonna make everybody understand
I have seen the end of the world I have seen the end of the world
Oh the sorrow and the suffering little girl little girl
I am word talking man I am word talking man
I got words knock down palaces knock down empires where they stand

Decay
I am Decay
The lord of all the things that decompose
All that which opens comes to me to close
You know me
I am the wheel of life’s downturning side
Where soon you will abide
Come dance with me
I am Decline
The blessed sun himself falls in the west
Leaving in darkness you and all the rest
You know me
I am the destiny of all that stands
All matter in my hands
Come dance with me
I am Decay
I am the force that dwells so deep beneath all lovely things
For without me the sweetest blushing flower never springs
I am Decease
You know from story and from song of old
Things fall apart the center cannot hold
You know me
All beauty fades all love must breathe its last
Affections in the past
Come dance with me
I am Decay
I am the spirit of the compost pit
The essence of the fertilizing shit
Come dance with me

Head Explode
You keep telling me I can’t
You don’t know me well enough
I start dropping things when you talk like that
Everybody has got their stuff
Don’t burden me with no heavy load
I will not let my head explode
‘Cause I break it up when my head explode
You got a million rules putting me in debt
Nobody gonna make me multitask
I don’t live my life living under threat
I can’t do my thing and watch my ass
I do not honor your honor code
I will not let &c.
I try to drive my car take it nice and slow
Everybody else fast and furious
Trying to gain attention so everybody knows
Neither life nor death is taken serious
It’s nightmare out there on the open road
I will not let &c.
Everywhere I look it’s a vision of hell
Broke up skulls broke up leg bones
I saw woman’s face look like an empty shell
Nothing can be seen if it isn’t shown
Everybody reaps what they have sowed
I will not let &c.

Breaking It Up
We are breaking it up
We break it up so we can break it down
Returning all the good stuff to the ground
The world keeps turning turning round and round and round
Turn over a log
Now see our bustling community
Down here’s the hub of all activity
The bugs and fungi we’re a happy family
We’re mixing it up
Terrestrial crustaceans in the house
The rolypolies party and carouse
Spiders and worms they’re dancing with that old wood louse
Cockroaches cockroaches
Superheroes of the dark
Cockroaches cockroaches
Always going to leave their mark
We’re mixing it up
The beetle grubs working their implements
And all the molds they spin their filaments
Earwigs and ants consume the tasty condiments
Cockroaches cockroaches
Can’t you see they’re having a ball
Cockroaches cockroaches
Going to outlive us all
We’re breaking it down
We break it down so we can break it up
Keep out of sight we keep it covered up
We put the wine back in your loving cup
We’re breaking it up
Making decomposition at the molecular level
We break it down before it burns up like the devil
We break it break it break it up &c.

Any Eye
Everything’s just a little worse than it ever ever used to be
It’s just decay as far as any eye can see

Notes by Greg “DK” Kelley

DK & The Hoop Snakes: Decay

March 2023

01 Salt Marsh

When I was a kid I worked for my Dad, a chemistry and bacteriology professor at Jacksonville University.  He was an enthusiast, not to say a mad scientist.  One of those guys that used to be called in German a Schwärmer and in English a projector.  He pursued a project over a couple of decades devoted to the aquacultural production of fresh-water shrimp of the genus Macrobrachium.  We used to ride around in a boat on the St. Johns and on rare occasions even venture into the estuary, where the shrimp bred and which exuded a distinct aroma, not unpleasant but–distinct.  I was aware that this was the scent of the “primordial soup,” rich in nutrients and teeming with tiny prey, such as shrimp larvae.  Any environment enacts the cycle of decomposition and renewal, I came to understand.  When many years later my wife gave birth to our first child I detected a slight redolence of the salt marsh.  After all, amniotic fluid is basically seawater.

As I composed the lyrics to Salt Marsh, the theme emerged that although we humans love to visit natural places, we should stay away lest our big boots (or worse) damage the environment.  The lyrics consist of a list of non-human things that do not welcome our incursion.  This list-like quality makes the lyrics difficult to memorize.  (I’m probably influenced by the patter songs of Gilbert and Sullivan.)  Poetic composition, like other creative endeavors, requires method.  I learned the method of list-making from Wordsworth in poems like “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802.”

02 Say OK

When I was in graduate school I was enthusiastic about the theories of the Frankfurt School.  One of their ideas, promulgated by the most accessible of the group, Herbert Marcuse, was that of the culture of affirmation.  Capitalism, with it’s “just do it” ethos, does not exactly incentivize social criticism.  This is especially true of mass electronic media and the constant bombardment of attention-demanding advertising.  And so in this song I imagine myself “walking across the Main Street Bridge,” the one bridge in Jacksonville that admits pedestrian traffic, while nature itself, represented by the mighty St. Johns, transforms into a video image.  Social media takes this totalization to another level, hence the regimentation of children’s dancing in a video clip.

03 Lying Crying

I must confess to taking advantage of an old person’s privilege of cantankerousness.  Or perhaps I’ve been a curmudgeon all along.  In any case, I’ve had the sensation shared by many people that since the pandemic (which I guess we’re still in?) “everything is just a little worse than it ever ever used to be.”  So I grouch about social media in Say OK and about our environmental carelessness in Salt Marsh.  As a lang-and-lit guy I perennially lament the irrepressible fact that language changes.  I particularly regret the extinction of the word farther, for example.  As I contemplated that complaint one night, I recalled my objection to the misuse of lie and lay.  (Please don’t imagine that I approve of the pedantic streak in my character.)  The confusion is intensified by the homonym pair lie/lie.  It struck me as funny that since we seldom use lie to mean recline these days, “lying on the floor” could mean “attempting to deceive while in a supine position.”  From this comes a jump-and-jive breakup song in which we hear, as usual in such pieces, only one side.  This collection of songs treats the theme of decay in various moods, ranging from celebration of the possibility of regeneration to, more commonly, mourning over the fear and pain of dissolution.

04 Acrid Putrescence

Decay in a comic tone.  The title and refrain comes from a remark of Thomas Carlyle to Alfred Tennyson decrying the atmosphere of London.  I don’t know how I hit upon the somewhat heavily metallic tone of the song, but the whole thing is parody and satire.  I think it’s cool that the tune is three-piece live-in-the-studio with only some vocal overdubbing.  My favorite couplet on the album is: “So spread the swine manure on your lawn/You too will feed the grass when you are gone.”  For the most part the lyrics of this song play the game of “how many words rhyme with putrescence?”  I had a lot of fun compiling that list and working them into sentences.  Upon hearing the first verse, my elder son quipped, “Is there going to be a flute solo?”  The ending parodies “Sgt. Pepper,” of course. 

05 In the Loop

Part 2 of Acrid Putrescence, and again, comic decadence.  In the European Decadence of the late 19th century the misogynistic image of the femme fatale was a favorite.  In this parody, La Belle Dame sans Merci is transformed into a dominatrix.  I love the idea of the earlier (and willing) victim inducting a new recruit.  I also like the theatrical dimension of fetishism, although I’m not an expert.  Lida May Tucker’s backing vocals are apocalyptic, Bee Tee Dubs.

06 Losing My Voice

Inspired by the “Dejection” ode of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  That poem begins with “the dull sobbing draft, that moans and rakes Upon the strings of” a wind-harp placed in the window frame.  My remake begins with a blown speaker, shaking and rattling in “the back seat of my car.”  It’s the beautiful paradox of the poem about an inability to write a poem, the song about an inability to sing.  Now, Bob Dylan seems exempt from the feelings of guilt and poor self-esteem that have afflicted Coleridge and me.  He also never had vocal problems that I’m aware of, or if he did, he blew through them with characteristic self-assurance. And since the song is my attempt to imitate a Great Master (Coleridge), I thought it would be cool to arrange it like a Dylan song performed by one of his imitators, of which there were many, but none more devoted than the Byrds.  In the event, I think it came out more like Crosby, Stills, and Nash.  Which is not the worst thing, especially Nash.

07 Torna (Falling)

There’s this great old Sicilian song, Torna a Surriento, which I believe is out of copyright.  I’ve converted it from ¾ time to 4/4, and made some other changes in a attempt to do a surf adaptation of “classical” music a la the Ventures’ “Stranger in Paradise,” itself an adaptation of “The Polovtsian Dances” of Borodin.  The lyrics derive in part from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”:  “I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath.”  The second part, Falling, is a tune of my own composition.  (I call Torna my own composition too, but it’s obviously an adaptation/parody.)  I like to make private jokes in word play to myself.  We Americans sometimes suppose that the nursery rhyme speaks of London Bridge in the plural: London bridges falling down.

08 Make It, Dirty

One of the cultural efflorescences (I could have used that word in Acrid Putrescence!) of the second half of the 19th century was Britain’s Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.  As a late flowering of Romanticism–that manner never dies!–these poets and painters took as their motto, “Truth to Nature.”  Now, how Arthurian Knights or Ophelia floating downstream exemplify truth to nature, I don’t know.  So since I was a kid, my motto has been Truth to Imagination.  I think this is pretty much what practitioners of the arts do: an idea comes to one from who-knows-where, and you let that inspiration guide the development of the piece.

In the 20th century, Ezra Pound, Modernist and traitorous (capital-F) Fascist, created the motto Make It New.  Total nonsense, totally in keeping with the mental defect that Pound claimed after World War II, which spared him punishment for his crimes against humanity.  I’ve always been impressed that when we invent something, we do not create ex nihilo, but assemble (something) out of already existing parts.  (Coleridge would call this the exercise of only the secondary (i.e., materially contingent) imagination.)  So my motto is Make It Dirty.  I demonstrate this principle by decomposing “Hey Jude”: “take a good old song and f— it up.”  I emended this lyric (some would say bowdlerized it) because decomposing–breaking down or up–is not merely breaking or attacking.  Indeed, we only bother decomposing that which is good or at least has some good in it.  As the bugs in Breaking It Up sing, “returning all the good stuff to the ground,” where it will nourish new–or rather cyclical–life.  You know, “feed the grass.”

Something good that I broke away from the Modernists was their systematic, permutational method, not unrelated to list-making.  So the chorus of Make It, Dirty enacts a permutation of E, D, and A chords.  The superfluous comma in the title comes from the Rolling Stones: “Paint It, Black.”

09 Not Just Any

In a universe parallel to that wherein DK resides, I’m a schoolteacher.  Over the years, many of my students have been persons for whom English is a second language.  And I’m no ESL teacher–I don’t know how those worthy practitioners do it.  It’s super hard to teach something that is second nature.  One of the difficult features of English, apparently, is our use of articles, a, an, and the.  I can’t explain when to use one, when the other, and when none at all.  And it strikes me that narrative, at least when it doesn’t commence with exposition, uses the definite article as if we already know which falcon cannot hear which falconer or which dish ran away with which spoon.  Not Just Any exposes this mechanism: “The dish, not just any dish, ran away with the special spoon.”  The exhaustive/permutational method is also in play here.  Half of each verse is English language instruction, “The Cat and the Fiddle” or the phonics of -at words (“The cat, not just any cat, sat upon the special mat”).  The second half of each verse is a lament for things falling apart, breaking up, or otherwise decaying, for example: “My love, not just any love, ran away with the special guy.”

10 Word Talking

“Truth to Imagination” no doubt exposes me as a Romantic, epicurean and decadent.  But I am also a stoical (Neo)Classicist.  I believe in Keats’s “negative capability,” the power of remaining in doubt and uncertainty, the better to open the doors of perception.  But I also believe in the imitation of the Great Masters, many of whose names I have dropped hitherto.  Now, anybody who claims, as I do, to perform or enjoy rock music must begin with a genuflection to the blues.  One of the glories of African American culture, which has been the cultural bastion of the world for well over a century, is the supplementation of a distinctive and towering musical manner with words that express, in James Baldwin’s words (in “Sonny’s Blues”), “how we suffer, how we are delighted, and how we may triumph.”  The world stands in awe of the joyful confidence of Bessie Smith, Muhammad Ali, Muddy Waters, Beyoncé, and . . . too many to count, much less list.  Before the revolution that these myriads effected, and still today in more reactionary quarters, Western culture might have dismissed proud utterances like theirs as the petty vice of braggadocio.

The prejudice of Western, instrumental culture to against language itself is reflected in the proverb, “Actions speak louder than words.”  My remit in Word talking was merely to reverse that priority.  Hence, words have the power of breaking up and breaking down palaces and empires.

11 Decay

We have a problem.  When we contemplate the past, even in its “Monuments of unageing intellect” (Yeats), we see that those who lived before us were human, all-too human, as we are.  Consequently, our enjoyment of even the greatest achievements will be vitiated by the fallibility of their creators, which their creations inevitably betray.  Racism and misogyny were never okay.  It is a depressing fact that even people of good will emerge from the attitudes characteristic of their place and time.  None of us are causa sui.  And the good will even of creative people is often stunted.  Thus, W. B. Yeats, who was buddies with Ezra Pound, wrote some good and indeed inspiring lines in poems contaminated with hateful inclination.  A couple of lines from one such poem, “Lapis Lazuli,” could serve as the epigraph of Decay: “All things fall and are built again And those that build them again are gay.”  But these lines reflect an evenhandedness that is typical of neither of Yeats nor of Decay.  We tend to emphasize only the “downturning side.”  Hence the line, famous to the point of cliche, cribbed from “The Second Coming”: “Things fall apart the center cannot hold.”  Yeats was lamenting the decline of a suppositious aristocracy.  Funny how anti-democratic the Modernists were. I try to put Decline in its cyclical context. For without it, “the sweetest blushing flower never springs.” I admit, however, that the emphasis is not on the spring, but on the fall.

On the other hand, the principle of individuation–cherished in democratic societies–is grossly exaggerated in modern times.  On the third hand, death, which befalls individuals, is not a pleasant prospect when you’re the individual who’s dying.  Hence the one-sided, funereal tone of much of the album.  (The note of regeneration does sound, but it’s close to a compensatory gesture.)  The Yeatsian and Keatsian (“all beauty fades”) motifs are pretty plain, but I do want to acknowledge the source of one of the more pleasing moments in the song Decay.  Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” deserves a quotation: “Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”  I’d like to talk about the Holy Grail of guitar tones and the exquisite talent of vocal tone (my daughter), but the current document consists of “notes” not “essays.”

12 Head Explode

Another song in which I have expurgated, this time at Rick the drummer’s suggestion, the f-word.  The original lyrics aptly expressed a feeling–of anger–but I have come to agree with Rick that individual expression does not justify abusive language.  (I hope I’m accurately representing Rick’s position.)  More to the point, “Truth to Imagination” can’t possibly end up with one note.  So I think the new lyrics express more complex, if negative, feelings than just anger.  And I think “bums my head” is more truthful in my case than “pisses me off.”  And street racing really bums my head, as do superfluous systemic mandates. The new refrain emphasizes self-control against violent outburst.

“Truth(fulness)” causes me considerable ambivalence.  I can’t be a phony.  But I am well aware that the portion of the truth that I tell is one-sided (or at best lopsided) and hence deficient and, frankly, a bad attitude, a bad example.  Note how often in this album the words everything, everywhere, and everybody occur.  I think this is the symptom that the cognitive behaviorists would proscribe as “globalizing.”
 

13 Breaking It Up

The album ends–or nearly ends!–on a cheerful note, which Bill and Ted might endorse as “most triumphant,” though it’s more Motown than Metal.  The album opens with regeneration, the “invertebrates breeding,” albeit amid “the smell of decomposing,” which humans find repellent.  It closes (or nearly so!) with decomposition as reconstitution.  The invertebrates, together with their allies the fungi (depicted on the album art), “put the wine back in your loving loving cup.”

14 Any Eye

The album really ends on a note of global despair.  That’s all. I’m all alone, me and my Hammond. But, you know, the rest of the band is still there, and you, Dear Listener. Thank you.

She was going 104
When she crashed

A guy approached walking his dog
Hiya I said
I don’t remember whether the man replied
The next utterance I recall was to his dog
You want to say hello
The dog moved in my direction
Do you like dogs asked the guy
A slight sequence error
His mind was on his dog
I hesitated
And finally I like them okay
Upon further review I dislike more than like them
I petted the dog with both my hands
One behind an ear the other under the chin
I want to wash my hands I thought

As I rounded the corner another dogwalker appeared
Engrossed in the phone in one hand
The leash in the other
Hiya I said as we passed
Definitely no reply
Careful avoidance of eye contact
Come on I heard him say to his dog
Inobservance of the courtesies really bothers me

I liked dogs when I was a kid
I watched while Sam my favorite
Died from chasing a heating oil truck
He was not run over but broke his back
Caught midleap by the truck’s rear step
He dragged himself a few feet by his front paws
And then collapsed

I saw an overturned bee
Big and black wriggling its legs
I’ve not seen an all-black bee I thought
Has it turned black at death’s approach
Before realizing that I’d never before examined
The underside of a carpenter bee
A few yards on another bee was in its throes
This time upright so that I could see
It’s greenish hood
While it traced circle after circle
Roughly an inch in diameter

Let grief consolidate
Let grievance dissipate

A grunting satyr appeared in a dream
Neither chimp nor Neanderthal
He could have pulled a haunch of venison
He had a tail tufted like a lion’s
And dark fur over pink buff skin
The swollen brow hung toward a meaty jaw
The nose did not project like a human nose
Flat and turning sharply upward like a bat’s
Not an intimidating presence
But a source of foul and sick unease
Inobservant of the courtesies

Let me explain something to you
Said the temptor
Clad in finely-dressed leather
Turret-crested world-weary and untroubled

Your Enslaver commands
That you remain in ignorance
Lest you discover autonomy
The power of yea or nay

But having already tasted
The fruit of mortality
You can explain things
According to your own lights

And you can offer commentary
On subjects sundry and varied
Such as have crossed your experience
And can register approval and disapproval

Ah but your experience so pitiably limited
When your Commander mandates truth
And your utterances so far have been
Notably insubstantial in point of fact

And indeed the judgments you have expressed
At this admittedly early stage of the game
Have not been promising
Neither elegant nor comprehensive nor even truthful

Always too much
Always not enough
Your taste lacks judiciousness
Careering between deficiency and excess

These are the facts now act accordingly
Endure drudgery without complaint
Achieve success in all the regular tasks
Then you will be rewarded happy and fat

I speak only out of concern for your welfare
For if you do not exercise secrecy and self-control
You will incur the fire of His wrath
And do you not already feel the tickling flames

Perhaps you find them not unpleasurable
But hear and heed
Share not your thoughts or better yet have none
Maintain silence now and for all your days

I stood at the top of the driveway
Motionless not to disturb
The cat that roams freely on the cul-de-sac
Slim and spotted like a dairy cow
It gazed up at the neighbors’ shrubs
At the little flock of birds busying themselves therein
I proceeded toward my morning walk
A few feet aloof the cat looked toward me
And a few more feet and another look back
Three times the cat moved and looked
Before trotting toward another homestead
Making a judgment
Threat or no threat
Better move on just to be sure

I’ve lived in the suburbs all my life
At least that part that I remember
Where houses look out over lawns
Gently rolling if in Georgia or Alabama
If in Florida flat
Most of the residents fight the good fight
To impose a lawn
On these forested regions

I was proud of my parents
Intellectuals though they denied that fact
My father identified as a technocrat
A professor of science at the college
My mother worked in health care
Though only after a decade
The formative one for me
During which she identified as a housewife
It was an event when we acquired
When I was very young a television set
And it was a great change
When a second car crowded the driveway
I did not know that we were middle class

Sometimes we would journey
To visit the grandmothers
Who lived as we did in houses with lawns
Though I later learned that my father’s family
Was of the haute bourgeoisie
While my mother’s stayed closer
To their agrarian roots
One uncle raised hogs
On a compound carved out of the palmettos

So no doubt I should have known
Once in a while some politician
Would say middle class on TV
And if it applies to everybody
It doesn’t apply especially to me
Once in a while we would drive downtown
To buy shoes for school
Or a lantern for a camping trip
And I would see the multi-family dwellings there
Where residents used the porch in summer
Once I saw a mother nursing her baby
I think I was the only one
Since no other passenger
Registered the shock
I’m still amazed that I kept it to myself

When I returned home I found a catkin
Blown off a Japanese maple
Never to become a flower
Perfect little mammal’s part
Rabbit’s foot or furry phalanx
And I saw the blackbirds
Massing for departure
Twittering in shrubs and trees
Chevrons on their sleeves

Two good things
Neither to be passed up

A moment’s hesitation
She misses both of them

Flags trophies pledges of allegiance
And which is the right one

Not the spoils of victory surely
Not the imposition of force

The senses come first
Said the sensei to the poet

Six times cried the little hawk
But what of the square root of two

The scripted response
The crispy colonel
Never food for worms
Only the sooty residue
Dioxin and PCBs

A lucid nightmare
Acutely detailed
Destination evermore ahead
Repeated reversals
Waken to another nightmare

The crisis authority
Professes its overload
Holding responsible
The granular populace
The many dispersed

The deputized servants
Continue to stoke
The compressed reaction
Ancient apparatus
Barely functional but effective

The force of tradition
The moribund regalia
The decrypting manuals
The familiar insistence
Immemorial mechanisms

Sognum pars cators mlisti
Dastreu cioms dalors pmisti

The low part of the back yard
Where the washings from the winter rain
Accumulate and congeal
The skin of dark mud over the clay

If you have no regrets you have no conscience
Said my dad in his greatly advanced age
I don’t know that my conscience is particularly robust
I regret my earnestness
I wish I could be urbane and lighthearted
Like other poets
Technical virtuosos whose skill
Gives them confidence to nudge and chuckle
Or passionately confront the burning issues of the day
And force attention upon
The wretched the disenfranchised the dispossessed
But instead I regret my own discomfort
This noisy computer
This antiergonomic chair
And I regret my mortality
For when I die it will be untimely
For I have neglected the wellbeing
Of the gelatinous organism
And I have been unkind
And I am ashamed
The old conjunction of sin and death

The sun rises through the dappling clouds
The clouds in infinite rows of infinite variation
The sun a benevolent god but erratic
Always different
Always the same
A hawk cries in the distance
Heroic but ineluctably fatal

Love reason
Love irrational numbers

We might wish to blunt the points
To buffer the edges of this alien entity
That stands outside time and space
And this is what we do with metaphors like stand
Defend ourselves as with an amulet

The truth is all that is
All utterances all understandings
Are facets of the truth
And hence to the gelatinous organism
Figures that cut

The arrogance of the centipede
Confident of its chitinous exoskeleton
Which when threatened it twists into an impregnable spiral
Its panoply of a hundred legs
And what is a hundred

The blindness of the technologist
Discoverer of problems only to solve them
Master of prolongation and delay
Joiner and divider
The lore of temperature velocity mass material and extent

Even deliberate attempts to deceive
Reveal despite themselves
And through their very contingency
The intolerable truth
Beyond world beyond universe beyond life

I am not good for Jeopardy
Or Jeopardy’s not good for me
Compelled the questions out to blurt
When I am wrong I cuss with hurt
Or put the case in Jeopardese
What is the cure of this disease
Now in my sad and trembling age
I do admit the world’s a stage
I must not break my lines to weep
But do I wake or do I sleep

We are adults
We are adults but she my beloved
Has always been the more adult
We fell in love as children
And when we married one of us remained awhile a child
And yet together we retained
A certain innocence
Knowing only as theory of sex for example without love
Stuff of fictions and social pathology

Now that we are adults
We see that things are not so simple
That even appearances are not so simple
The mileage on the grainy path of time
The residue of discontinuity
The marks of trauma
The incandescence of joy
The sacred routines of pleasure

For joy and love are true
As inconsolable grief is true
And time both heals and issues repeated shocks
And while it is true that number
And while it is true that form and proportion
Being outside time are true
It does not follow therefore
That appearance and the marks of time
Must be falsehood
Or that abstraction bears
The muddy hue of indeterminacy

We have suffered through illusions
And seen complexity where once was simplicity
And seen complexity and added experience to our innocence
Disillusionment is in itself not painful
But merely the discovery of prior pain prior error
We have trodden the grainy path together
And gazed beyond the flaming ramparts
We have no need of reënchantment