gamelan resonating in a tract home

Forrest Fang's Gongland lived up to its advance praise. It's ambient music with heavy Indonesian gamelan influence, well worth owning. We sat on our postage stamp back patio watching lightning bugs in our postcard back yard while the sun set orange through purple storm cloud skies, and the sounds of synthesizers disguised as gamelans created a mist of pleasant ambience for everything.

I need to get more music. I have that Mountain Goats' new CD I still haven't purchased, I want to get that R. Stevie Moore with "Fletcher Honorama" on it, and I want to get 10 CDs from people I never heard of from dollarcd.com. If you're going to talk the "support indies" talk,
you gotta walk the "buy their CDs" walk, otherwise, you're just one more poet submitting to a magazine which you've never purchased.

little deaths

they termed their love
a folie a deux,
a mutual delusion (they'd explain),
shared by two;
graduate school passion
always has great adjectives,
double meanings and words without meaning.

over coffee, at the curiously outre
shop with the electronic music
and the unreliable cappuchino machine,
she'd script out for her friends
evenings and dawns she described as
"in the moment", even though the
silent, passionate "moment"
seemed to require a lot of explanation,
much as one would imagine that
a user's manual in valentine writing
would require many pages, and
lots of technical sketches.

he often spent long spaces of time
defending his novel
from his MFA's adviser's critique
that real people did not use
phrases like "their nights were
filled with petit morte",
as his nights, he said,
with a mildly unforgiveable grin,
did indeed involve many "little deaths";
he was convinced when he made his adviser
blush, her blush merely reflected
the purity of his purpose.

but when the degrees were awarded,
and all the French poetry had been read,
and they had job offers in different cities,
and it was time to put down deposits on leases,
they looked at one another,
and said "we had a folie a deux"
and their small love died a little death,
at midnight,
with barely a sigh.

now she sits outside her office building,
dragging on a cigarette, dying a little
at a time,
and his novel,
always a small thing,
is withering out its
last moments on the vine.

Rael the Imperial Aerosol Kid

Fun mail tonight. I had sent off to mail artist Rael's mail art call for work with the theme "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" some months ago. "The Lamb", of course (who "seems right out of place, Broadway street lights find a focus in his face") is the last Genesis album with Peter Gabriel, the "magnum opus" to which Gabriel seemed always to be pointing, but, alas, never quite reached. Oddly, the first two post-Gabriel albums were Genesis' best, and then Genesis became largely unlistenable thereafter.

I chose to depict a passage from the song "The Carpet Crawlers", and in particular, the line "you gotta get in to get out, out"...using the illustrations from the song such as the "crawlers cover the floor", the "mild mannered supermen" and a world of various religious imagery. I had all but forgotten the call, but now Rael, the sponsor (neat play on words, Rael being the protagonist in "The Lamb") sent me a cool letter with stamps from not only the Netherlands, but also stamps from Russia, Poland, and some other place. Inside, a panoply of really neat drawings. Rael pleased me with his art, or, as the Genesis song says: "something inside me has just begun, Lord knows what I have done...".

Our neighbors, the nicest couple who moved here from Pakistan, just had us over to their house for a few moments. They have the cutest nine month old.

Then I did a crayon picture of alien wildflowers for one postcardx, another picture, also in crayon, of a blue squid with a verse analogizing squids to hearts,
a brief poem about how I feel more connected on a mowed field with blackbirds than in a nice restaurant surrounded by friends (kinda sad, really, but such is the muse), and mailed my book to someone unknown (indeed, a truly random postcardx mailing).

I sure draw good blue squid. I may have a future beyond drawing thistle.