return me to a cigarette

i wrote a new one today. abbie likes it. but it's not as good as this!



maybe tomorrow i'll manage to get at least a rough version of the new ones up here. meanwhile, i humbly submit this poem, by my favorite gal. enjoy it responsibly.



There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons -
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes -

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us -
We can find no scar,
But internal difference -
Where the Meanings, are -

None may teach it - Any -
‘Tis the Seal Despair -
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air -

When it comes, the Landscape listens -
Shadows - hold their breath -
When it goes, ‘tis like the Distance
On the look of Death -


Emily Dickinson (#320)

i was born by the river

sorry for the long hiatus. i am definitely extra full of insight, wit, and touching poetry, though, as a result.

there's probably interweb slang for this phenomenon, whereby after missing a few days you feel the (sometimes paralyzing) urge to find something truly postworthy. otherwise you have to face the fact that you were probably posting too often before.

or else face the fact that there's really no reason for you to be posting at all. or at least no good reason.

my strategy, the obvious one, was going to be to post a song. but it's just taking too darn long. abbie and i have one we like, and we hope you will like it too. but at the moment it is missing some words. anybody got any words they can loan us?

meanwhile, please enjoy this poem, which was inspired by sacred heart's production of cinderella, and please take good care of yourself and get some sleep.


Lullaby


Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's carnal ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find our mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.



W. H. Auden

crazy experiment

a special exclusive for blog readers!!:

there's a new tune over at right. it's called "emily." it's what i did today! and it has some experimental experiments. i would really appreciate feedback if you have a minute to leave some. even if all you do is make fun of me - i would still be very grateful.

hope you're doing well. over and out.

continuing nerd education

so, music production is a nerd field. it appeals to a wide nerd spectrum, from hi-fi nerds to lo-fi nerds, from nerds with lots of nerd friends to loner nerds.

and it offers a treasure-trove of what i would call "nerd crack:" which is, of course, minutiae. not just any old minutiae, but technical, counterintuitive, obnoxious minutiae that every once in a long while turn out to be really important.

i remember using a program in college called reason, which was really cool (in a nerdy way). it's music creation software, and it's completely digital - you don't need to know how to play an instrument or anything. i remember one guy made a cool (nerd) song totally from sounds he made using a paper bag.

anyway, what made reason so appealing and (nerd-) useful was the knobs. rows and rows of hundreds of little knobs. if you've ever seen a mixing console in a recording studio, you know that there are lots of knobs involved in this process; but in reason, because it was all digital, you could have as many knobs as you wanted. you could build your rack so that the knobs went on to infinity.

and each knob represents a Decision. and most of them don't matter, but some of them do. thus, nerd-crack: you could spend hours and days turning little knobs this way and that to see if they made something cool happen - all while sitting in a dark basement with headphones on, getting paler by the minute.

well, i'd been in withdrawal for a while without really realizing exactly what i was jonesing for. turns out it was something very, very obvious. something even non-nerds recognize and maybe even use: the graphic equalizer.

seriously, how cool is this thing? if you've never played with one, i must insist that you try it. itunes has one. just mess with them while a song is playing and see if you aren't overcome with the giddiness of a schoolgirl as i have been.

of course, this might turn out to be a gateway drug for you - and you could end up a full-blown nerd. after all, you're already reading a blog instead of going outside.

be careful.

i've updated "the pirate song" and might do so again, soon. also "emily" is in the works, an older song that i still like and have never recorded.

here's a mardi gras picture i'm just getting around to posting:



and a poem:


The Red Wheelbarrow


so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.


William Carlos Williams



Thanks for stopping by.

a tree Full of kids

Hey everyone. I heard some new music today, by a guy called William Fitzsimmons. At some moments his music sounds a lot like what I wish my music sounded like. At other moments his music just sounds really good. These are initial impressions and I invite you to disagree vigorously.

I had a lot of chores today, and I had a little of running around in the park with a dog pulling a leash pulling one arm and a laughing kid under the other arm. I can recommend the latter.

Abbie has a cute haircut and is working hard on the road trip. She would not call it work, though, because she is the product of millions of years of instinctual biological urges, all striving unconsciously to create the perfect road trip-planner. Watching her at it is like watching a great white shark devour a seal, which I have seen on T. V., except not on T. V. and therefore not in slow-motion.

Here's a poem


IN RESPONSE TO A RUMOR THAT THE OLDEST WHOREHOUSE IN WHEELING, WEST VIRGINIA, HAS BEEN CONDEMNED


I will grieve alone,
As I strolled alone, years ago, down along
The Ohio shore.
I hid in the hobo jungle weeds
Upstream from the sewer main,
Pondering, gazing.

I saw, down river,
At Twenty-third and Water Streets
By the vinegar works,
The doors open in the early evening.
Swinging their purses, the women
Poured down the long street to the river
And into the river.

I do not know how it was
They could drown every evening.
What time near dawn did they climb up the other shore,
Drying their wings?


For the river at Wheeling, West Virginia,
Has only two shores:
The one in hell, the other
In Bridgeport, Ohio.

And nobody would commit suicide, only
To find beyond death
Bridgeport, Ohio.



James Wright

said Coyote, exasperatedly

More tunes and photos are in the works. Meanwhile, I present two twentieth-century gems with crispy contours and gooey centers:


COYOTE AND THE HEDGEHOG


One day Coyote was walking in the woods when he saw Hedgehog. The hedgehog was hungry, but Coyote didn't know it. But Hedgehog had an idea.

"What are you doing?" asked Coyote.

"I am sitting on my eggs," replied Hedgehog.

"But hedgehogs don't lay eggs!" shouted coyote.

"I do."

"How do you do it?"

"Go get some eggs and sit on them."

"Okay."

So Coyote did this and never ate. Soon Coyote died of hunger. The hedgehog ate him.


The moral is:

Don't listen to hungry hedgehogs.


Abbie Feinstein



Dawn


Dawn in New York has
four columns of mire
and a hurricane of black pigeons
splashing in the putrid waters.
Dawn in New York groans
on enormous fire escapes
searching between the angles
for spikenards of drafted anguish.
Dawn arrives and no one receives it in his mouth
because tomorrow and hope are impossible there:
sometimes the furious swarming coins
penetrate like drills and devour abandoned children.
Those who go out early know in their bones
there will be no paradise or loves that bloom and die:
they know they will be mired in numbers and laws,
in mindless games, in fruitless labors.
The light is buried under chains and noises
in an impudent challenge of rootless science.
And crowds stagger sleeplessly through the boroughs
as if they had just escaped a shipwreck of blood.


Federico Garcia Lorca

for a good time

Here's a thought for you: two apes (with no tails) looking at the earth's magnificence in a tiny box. Narrated by Sir David Attenborough.

Yes, Abbie and I have been enjoying the Planet Earth series. Abbie closes her eyes when the predators get close. We both laugh out loud at the sheer majesty of the images. And you just can't help thinking - we are part of this, and yet so not a part of it. I will never see a snow leopard in the wild. So, it's wonderful and mind-expanding. And at the same time it's also just more TV, and it's more of sitting in a room looking at a little screen. As I am still doing. As you are doing.

Well, at least here's a poem for you! The best I can offer.



Forgive My Guilt


Not always sure what things called sins may be,
I am sure of one sin I have done.
It was years ago, and I was a boy,
I lay in the frostflowers with a gun,
The air ran blue as the flowers, I held my breath,
Two birds on golden legs slim as dream things
Ran like quicksilver on the golden sand,
My gun went off, they ran with broken wings
Into the sea, I ran to fetch them in,
But they swam with their heads high out to sea,
They cried like two sorrowful high flutes,
With jagged ivory bones where wings should be.

For days I heard them when I walked that headland
Crying out to their kind in the blue,
The other plovers were going over south
On silver wings leaving these broken two.
The cries went out one day; but I still hear them
Over all the sounds of sorrow in war or peace
I ever have heard, time cannot drown them,
Those slender flutes of sorrow never cease.
Two airy things forever denied the air!
I never knew how their lives at last were spilt,
But I have hoped for years all that is wild,
Airy, and beautiful will forgive my guilt.


Robert P. Tristram Coffin