“Spirals” courtesy Hillary Jones
Sound is to music, as word is to Poetry, as thought is to dream; each entwining the other. Yet, they cannot be disentangled in the sense of defining where one begins and its counterpart ends, for it is not a relationship of continuity or dualism. Rather, the synergy is between abstract manifestation and proliferating possibility; each element, each meme, each cell, displacing its essential nucleus and transforming its mitochondria into the arcane icons and symbols through which we reveal to ourselves who we are, want to be, or wish to evolve towards, at any given moment, in stroboscopic packets of infinitely condensed eidetic wisdom.
Music and poetry exponentially alter sound and meaning and, in searching for their own echo, bifurcate and repeat themselves—a mitosis which sometimes leads to mutation. This is at the heart of art’s creatively proliferating DNA; for it is unstable and yet also sublime, alchemically transforming everything within its sphere of influence, until it too is transformed by the process that it has set in motion. This harnessing of random energies is constantly re-inscribed into the clay palimpsest of the present moment; a moment built on innumerable prior moments, invariably boiling over in a crescendo of decisive inertia.
Our respective vocabularies of sound are inevitably construed as disparate lists of favored songs, treasured albums and thumb-drives of remembered ecstasies, apotheosized and reified into tangible aspects of the self. An innumerable diversity of possible sources abounds; but whatever specific piece of music triggers a response and wherever it may occur, it marks the moment when the self dissolves, as in the act of erotic communion, into a variegated tuber-bundle of myriad other selves resonating to the echo of a particular place—a numinous vibration jarring the sensorium. Yet such experiences remain variable and indeterminate, producing a metaphorically alchemized synesthesia integral to both music and poetry, and subject to reformulation at the slightest whim, or shift in temperature, like anthropomorphic cloud silhouettes embedded in the walls of a typhoon.
These evocations can take the form of lists, raves, reflections, one-sided epistolary expressions, dedications, inspirations and polemical arguments; moreover, they may coalesce from autobiographical narratives, descriptions of un-producible, esoteric, songs or movie soundtracks, even surreal attempts at impossible transcriptions. The varieties of such poetry are, in fact, infinite, and can mutate into a multiverse of hybrids and miscegenations, as varied as the sound-cultures which might have inspired them.
The possibilities for transcendence inherent in the creation and exploration of mongrelized aesthetic forms are perfectly articulated in Hassan i Sabbah’s famous maxim, “Nothing is true, everything is permissible.” Consider allowing this credo of epistemological terrorism to function, in this instance, as a prompt and a challenge. Write what you like; reinvent the familiar as something new, transforming music back into primordial breath and restoring through poetry a unity whose ghostly vigor still haunts the disassociated sub-divisions compartmentalizing the contemporary landscape.
-J. Zachary Rothstein
______________________________________
Riffing On Miles Davis – Charles Cantrell
Thurston Demands Moore – J. Zachary Rothstein
Action Taken – Bevin Moeller
Unrest in the Kitchen – Hanz Olson
and it’s all lilacs now – Brett Moe
Ample Shed – Hanz Olson
______________________________________
Riffing On Miles Davis
I don’t know if he ever practiced
until his fingers and lips grew numb–
a way, when he began to hurt, he knew style
and soul ran along the same line.
Call it nerve, which is what it took when he turned
his back on the audience
usually near a diminuendo, and why he did this
some call arrogance, but I think concentration, no
distractions. Some fans loved it and knew
he’d step back around–those long
slender fingers tapping as fast as rain on a tin roof shack,
one of many near Memphis Miles drove past
toward a gig. Imagine him picturing a woman
listening to the blues on a battered radio–
a baby crawling on the floor toward a slice
of fried baloney furled like a pig’s ear.
Picture it or not, Miles grew up, son of a dentist
I don’t know if he thought he had it too good,
especially after men in black leather ushered him in
a club’s back door in Chicago, though he and “Bird”
were the show. I don’t know when Miles
took his first hit of heroin.
But either way, between the highs and lows,
the shit and the beauty, here’s my favorite story,
about him: He stood in a hotel closet,
door open, his eyes and mouth closed.
Instead of Boo, I think he said, “Is this dark enough for you?”
Someone across the room flinched
and laughed at the same time, as Miles lifted
his trumpet and began to play.
_______________________________________
Thurston Demands Moore
We must destroy the record companies; cake them and cream their box elder horns with flailing strumpets of pancake and waffle house menu-wrap plastic; mandrill-fuck their moons like tranquil toothed Hamptons in mucous—their un moveably zonked stilt-stadium festival of dry gums where Topekanese mongrels, chicken and slurp to calibrated android metronome dumplings of ego ascendant desert Mandrax orbits.
We must harness the soup of the naked where mulligan sloths of transcranial oscillations spin a single flurtzing electron; isolate its rock of hair-dryer-helmet implacability in eyeball trinket rumblings of myriad bulls; its depth row hung drumlin stacked est and ostrich—pyroclastic protuberances hackneyed to goat-brow nubness.
We must labyrinth into full fronded rooms of silly people playing unfathomed enormities—strenuous shredglass, like Uri- Geller-spoons of bent instruments, grappling hooks esteemed into whale sputum eternities, vibrating like unctuals of Devonian string—this bone house of cartilaginous lungfish, whose lava-lamp and metal-machine swords emit Brancanian mosaics of dorsal colossi weeping feedback extremities through glottal zebras of prime alveolar geothermals.
We must infer winglets of elbow, birded and trussed in deep feathers of tent, where none had been apparent before; and do it in a solemn and jocular incontinence of blathering sound, the drunk-cufflinks and spun gruzzet reverse-polarities of tuna-directionals; de-Abu-Ghraibify radar trones and brultims of ovarianated mulch—gorx the plutonium factrix of flamboyantly fracked steam-injectors, the paleazo-arctrons of copper scarred tectonics…
Until the world looks red
with white power sneakers
on the beautiful beat of black feet.
_______________________________________
Action Taken
The safest place he could think of was his own home.
Lowered into the courtyard the lantern paper
Window was soft day when I woke
In the target made of women,
Their lives still spersed with laughter
Upstairs and in the garden somewhere run down.
Wake up whenever kind of welcome.
Intruders were out of the question.
Night, I notice the leaning structure. I had heard of it:
Love, too, threatened to fall –
The reason, maybe, there were not more people in his house
Or that part of the city, each shelf of masonry
Painted cream, a ghost evacuated from its plan.
Still the place did not grow hearts.
There would be too much blood.
He knew the real situation.
His home was like him. I hesitate
To think of being put somewhere by a man, in a dream.
I mean my need for someone who knows the patterns,
The basis of my fear. The word “finally” was unnecessary
The morning in the dream someone acted on my story.
Relieved, I awoke amid processes of condensation.
How do lanterns let in so much gone.
The people there prefer laughter and are
Sonorous planets. I am like their sister.
Yes, one empty structure may fall: the surprise flickers
Then is scenery. Location cured the despair
I lugged across the ocean for everyone last year.
I am suddenly the pebble people should be.
I do not arrive at night. No one can see me.
The women say I’ll join them last. He’s not home.
There were places I slept very deeply
Where I could not barricade the door.
The crimson nation grew to the size of one heart.
Night was cool and the women play jazz
With their locations in the house,
Porcelain spoons sunning their faces with lanterns,
The space between them a solar system.
The safest place, he knew, would be here.
I don’t see what they wear, their hearts
Bigger than stars, they are such believers.
_______________________________________
Unrest in the Kitchen
Ground sticks to your bent cloak in a comfortable
response to a soft universe, and soil soaks up
what seeps through the furnishings “some other
wastrel” will attend. Wet bags of lettuce and,
for the one in many, a bollard; a start and finish—
eyes and hair uncapped—paths trod in a kimono
seldom pressing pause. It was all a burst of falling
for the nickel, or crashing for the dime.
Here heals a heart, a separate light beside the
robust channel, beside the nail head of an illness
leaping on solecistic leaves. Synesthesia marks
its collaborative oar on the line disappearing w/
the sled, and only when you need more can you
descend. The blotted pillow case shouting mind
you stop, and the careless film no one will unpack.
It was a bond of lamplight and decadence that kept
a surplus of goldfish in the kitchen, only you ate off
that frozen plane now a forest until a name cracked
the water under a searching violin, under a team
of anabatic horses. Who would smile w/ such hesitation
but that croaking of a victory misaligned, that whistling
of mag wheel and needle? The books you read, the songs
you listened to again: all streets longing for what’s ripped
up and blown about, all dear peels of Cage’s carsick
onions meeting you with their oncoming favor.
Your bucket is a horse, and more are at the gate ready
to revive the hope of inviting in an old feeling forced to build
down. Horsemint tea and gnomic go-arounds unpack the sound
of a book hitting the floor, a gunshot from outside–that hand-
carved bombycid startling you from within the toggle-switch
of a farewell.
______________________________________
and it’s all lilacs now
and it’s all lilacs now, and it’s summer, leave the
windows open, keep the windows open kind of
summer. City breathing in past the balcony,
colliding on a crash course with my chest while
I’m staring, staring at the orange outside the
window while the light and air cradles my balls
and shines on her ass.
Listening to the natural and urban jazz passing
by, we’re making rhythm baby, we’re writing
melody, we’re improvising on the fly, we’re drums,
and birds, and horny, and we’re moving just like
seasons, and we are part of summer, and it’s all
lilacs now.
For once the pieces whole, all at once complete, all
come together, and I get it all, and I’m dripping
out of her, and it’s all lilacs now.
The melody resolves, the chord progression
played, the chords played by a fucking
triumphant parade of marching bands with
telecasters slung over their shoulders, and it’s
choreographed and overcast, choreographed on a
scale so grand it doesn’t seem planned. To the
untrained eye, cloudy, foggy, overcast, but now
we’re trained, now its clear, and now we
understand.
and shit I guess this is it, ya know, the big one,
what all the writers write about, what all
reporters report on, and what all analysts
analyze. But now it’s mine and it’s all cherry soda,
and it’s all lemon twists, and it’s Christmas,
firework displays, mangos, and lazy Saturdays.
and if this isn’t it then fuck it, it’s the next best
thing, it’s the new thing
it’s the goddamn thing to do, and it’s all purple,
and it smells so sweet,
and it’s all lilacs now.
and if the empire falls around us, if it crumbles
and can’t stand back up then it’s all lilacs now
______________________________________
Ample Shed
Everything is shark when pulled back into the wrestled yard,
into the strong stance of a microphone. Ma Jolie and a photo
in the bus yard, in some old warehouse in a Denver built up
around Nintendo songs, built up around what is forward,
what is poetry scribbled in the margins of a second round,
scribbled in a crack of fire aboard a paper boat. Here we are
blue ghosts sliding down the drain of some enormous space,
here we are leopard-bound quarters in the urinal, a National
Association of Letter Carriers, fried eggplant and a bowl
of white rice. I died within the origin of harmless apps,
and all of the virtual flowers vyied for conxtion, for a pair
of low tides on the snowy path, for an arc of rust over the world’s
capitols. The evolution of experimental psychology picks up leaves
pulled in around your shattered frame just as you insert your impurity
next to mine.
Innumerable Stumble 