monodramas

Neither
After Beckett

It’s not the neither we fear so much as the either.
What choices we made we did not know we were making.

If nothing were the only choice wouldn’t we have accepted it?

But something and then a lesser something;
between these two things there can be no peace
only indecision (that inability to know what’s right is right
even when the wrong was certain to have cleaved
you from crown to feet) remains

staggered between the doors, open or closed,
or, more likely, open and open, your feet moved
as quickly as the fluttering oak’s seeds
with their curious uptilt
turning leaf to propeller.

You were, in other words, going in circles.

If this was a quality you admired in me,
my sense of justice, my ability to see that nothing was wrong
and nothing, equally, right--

They say that a woman, waiting for her lover,
gave up and turned into a tree

or didn’t give up, kept waiting until her feet took root
and continued on until he returned.

Living, he saw only that the she he had known was dead
and in its place stood the brown remains
of what had been devotion.

He turned away from that half open door.

He went back to town and married the butcher’s daughter
whose hands were not quite stained with blood
but smelled constantly of the metal and tannin
of the knife and old soap.

They sat in the winter and ate jerky together
pulling it into pieces until it was soft again.

moths

When you’re thinking you’re not having a thought unless you can write it down. If you have a thought but then you cannot write it down you are not having a thought. The thing that seems to be happening in your brain is like what happens when you check a potato for electricity – the potato will have electricity but the potato is not thinking, nor is it thinking about whether or not it is thinking. This line of reasoning will get us nowhere. Check your head for electricity and there will be electricity. Will there be enough electricity to kill a man? No, but perhaps enough to kill a moth that decides to alight within. The head can have moths. Maybe what you feel when you wonder if you’re thinking but you’re not thinking because you can’t write it down, is moths. The powder falling off with the flap of their wings. Their eyes on those flimsy stalks flickering left and flickering right. Write it down, and then you will be thinking, you will have a thought. The shape that remains when you lift their bodies from the dust is the character of the first letter.

the D-minor mood

"Impetuous as if conquering territory ...gravitas with moments of reverie..."

There are a few lies every singer tells at an audition. Most common is the imagined illness: a throat over-lined with phlegm, a nasal passage conquered by the prickles of oncoming sinusitis, an accidentally ingested grape leaf stuck in the esophagus (not an illness, but still, an unfortunate sort of vocal ailment). They get onto the stage and put their hand to their chest and cough, expelling dry air into the space, looking at the accompanist (tempo? key?) shuffle their feet to the left, to the right, put their hands into the folds of their long skirts, their trouser pants, their mossy sweaters, and breathe. They are not like dancers, who pull their legs up and their arms out, rippling the muscles they plan to show. Their talent does not sit as a golden mantle on their bodies. Some beautiful, some with faces like depressed Chihuahuas, some slouching, some twitching their noses as if they can smell the comments you will think before you make them. Whatever lives in their throat is invisible, even if it speaks to them. The high F is there today, sitting on its shelf, simply reach up and throw it over.

Do they dream of this? If they do, there’s no romance there. No maestro in violet cloaks rushing to his feet to wave a wand and command the performance. No chirping birdsound to score the moment. 

the sky fell

And there were two inches of mussed gray ice on the ground as you heard the sound of rocks thrown down the gutter. The roof of the house across the street flew into the air and seemed to hover before it drifted down and you realized it was actually falling when it came to rest on your own front stoop. Crash, bang.

It's not that anything ever changed around you. The same paper bag that came across your face whose crinkled brown surface you condemned for the flecks of dirt you thought you tasted as it passed and seemed only to indicate disintegration went softly to the floor and the next day you walked by it and thought of the family of ants that must be living in its corners. You slipped in the ice and when the salt pressed into your cheek you wondered if you'd seasoned the soup. The leaves finally dipped red.

and now here to sing this lovely ballad -

 

Like a lot of people, I get into song funks.

I wake up every morning, turn on my computer, and play one song for weeks. Anyone who's ever lived with me can attest to this irritating regularity. 


My earworm is no snob. I went through a particularly troubling period where I played the 90s clunker 'Faded' by Soul Decision for a month, propelling it to the top of my Most Played (this a song most notable for its astonishing rap interlude, which includes the phrase 'the way we conversated' and ends, 'How's it goin'? Ha! - I'm faded'). 


It's basically unknowable how my brain decides what it will have, but what it wants, it craves. 


For some months now, though its frequency's decreased, the song of the moment is the Mamas and the Papas' 'Dream a Little Dream of Me.' It should probably disturb me that nothing's come to take its place, as this seems some arcane psychological judgment my taste is making on my mental state, but nothing rights my nerves like Mama Cass singing her lovely ballad. 


The lyrics are this side of saccharine, the title refrain smacking of the doo-wop ditty it could have been, its penny melody origins. It has the crucial three minute length, chemically proven to be the only amount of time a pop song should occupy. But despite its pleasantly familiar structure and catchy chorus, its requisite oo-ah backup and da-dum da-dum rhythm, it reads more like elegy than harmonic snack. 


It's not just Mama Cass that makes this happen, though her voice, richly mournful, thrummingly sweeping, imbues each word with pointed feeling. She pulls out vowels like warm taffy, the voice diminishing finally into pure da rum dum hum singalong that itself fades out into whistle and silence. 


The song is very baldly about the famous kind of romantic nostalgia - the lover missing the beloved - that informs some huge percentage of all art, but this rendition frames this old tragedy in the terms of sweet 60s pop. It seems to say: maybe there's something nice about feeling sad, when you have something nice to feel sad about. 

you are falling down a blue hill into a violet pond

The dream is a lot like a foreign movie, with a definite and separate narrative offered by the subtitles and the actual action. In a foreign movie, the subtitles are the unavoidable, unmistakable laid down created track of the film. But at the same time, you see what is really happening, and sometimes the subtitles seem right and sometimes they don't but while you're watching one seems to describe the other.


That's garbled, but what I mean is that dreams possess at the very least two simultaneous streams of meaning (not meanings within meanings, a la Inception, but the dream of Inception had all the dreams of Inception been compressed into one totally incomprehensible and inseparable mess of significant surrealism), which at the time of the dream seem not to be at cross purposes, but in waking shudder apart to make themselves singular. Then you no longer can tell what you felt while you were selling pencils from an ice cream stand in a crumbling facsimile of Bombay while air balloons perforated the sky. You try to hold onto the solid items you knew you saw but as they coalesce into anything known, they rapidly stop resembling the items you remembered.

advice we thought we learned from fairy tales

There were small and large forms of despair and the large forms looked as much like the small ones as the small ones did like the large.


The castles that had once loomed over the grottos were turning grey with the soot of the nearby glass factories and had to be rinsed down with hoses on Mondays. 


Everyone who lived in the village with the books had to learn to read only from the three books and were allowed no other words to them.


Once you turn your face from the mirror the mask that is left looking back will begin to smile. 


Shaking dust out from the carpets will improve your upper back strength as well as make you handsomer to young women with yellow hair. 


When the large forms of despair begin to look like the small forms of despair this means things will only continue to get worse. 


When the small forms of despair begin to look like the large forms of despair, you should wash your face with very cold water. This will also improve the appearance of youth and decrease wrinkles around the eyes. 


Killing chickens is sacrilegious and will make the town smell like bad wine. 


The woman in the supermarket line, the woman wearing the baggy green pants and pink windbreaker, the woman with the hair of yellow and white fuzz, the woman with the shaking and jagged left arm who is dropping milk in the aisle, the woman who cannot pronounce the word eggs, this woman used to sell jeweled fruits at the marketplace for more money than could fit in as many shopping carts as would circle this entire store, twice. 


It is important to sleep facing left. 


It is important to work the calves for appropriate legs.


It is very important that you speak in your small voice when you are talking to a king. 


Kings without teeth know the most painful ways to betray their mistresses.


The small forms of despair and the large forms of despair were the same form of despair, which was simply, despair without shape or end, without height or heaviness, simply invisible, spreading both over and through anyone who even believed they could smell it.