Lizzyville

Florence & The Machine's Fear of the Dark

Corrections to Other People's Music Writing - Edition of November 4, 2009

Read the inaugural edition of this series here.

Determining Whether The xx's xx Is Good or Great and If Great, How Great

Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim, lead singers of The xx.

Regret the Error: Corrections to Other People's Music Writing

You know, like in the "Corrections" section of a newspaper.

In "Inside The Monster Ball: Lady Gaga Reveals Plans for Ambitious New Tour" (Rolling Stone, Oct. 26, 2009), the singer was incorrectly quoted as saying, "The design of the [tour] is very, very forward, very, very innovative." The correct quote is: "The design of the [tour] is very, very, very forward, very, very, very innovative." We regret the error.

Due to space constraints, in the article "Ex-Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher to start a new band" (NME, October 26, 2009), the singer was cut off by the interviewer. The singer has requested that the entire interview be printed on our website. To the question, "Do you miss Oasis?" Gallagher responded, "I'm always going to miss Oasis. It was my fucking thing, you know what I mean? It's who I am. But it's only a name. [Begin redacted section.] I mean, who the fuck came up with that name? Who the - FUCK. Did you fucking do this? [gestures to used tea bag on coffee table] FUCK THE FUCKING GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE." We regret the demise of print media.

Due to a printer error, an article on the rehearsals for Chris Brown's new music video, "Watch Chris Brown Rehearse for Powerhouse Concert," (MTV.com, October 26, 2009) featured the following unedited paragraph:

"Throughout rehearsals, a yellow Bumblebee mask from the "Transformers" movies sat on a desk nearby. As "Transform Ya" began to play, Brown and his dancers stood in a straight line, their heads bowed. A line from 2007's "Tranformers," delivered by Optimus Prime, played over the speakers: "They're a young species. They have much to learn."

The correct paragraph should read:

"Throughout rehearsals, a bumblebee swarmed around the room. Brown and his dancers stood very, very still. As "Transform Ya" began to play, Brown began to cry. It was unclear whether he was crying about the bumblebee or his violent victimization of his now ex-girlfriend. Brown and the other dancers bowed their heads. The bumblebee approached Brown from behind, landing on the middle of the back of his neck on his topmost vertebra. Brown, not realizing that the sting of the bumblebee is mild and uneventful and that the bumblebee is a troubled species, began to scream, retrieved a toy Transformer from his backpack, and swatted at the bee until it was weakened into submission, lying on its back on the floor of the dance studio. The CD of "Transform Ya" started to skip. Brown brought one limited-edition Nike sneaker down upon the bumblebee and killed it. "They're a primitive species," Brown declared to his backup dancers, several of whom appeared distraught by the incident. "They have much to learn."

Due to an editing oversight, "U2's 360 Tour Returns to U.S. in June!" (Spin, October 26, 2009) incorrectly featured an exclamation point and other uses of hyperbole, including a description of the band as "the gang" and a play on the name of the band's latest album ("There's no horizon in sight.") We regret U2.

Elizabeth Gilbert Shares Some Wisdom on Getting Published

"I often hear people say, “I’m not good enough yet to be published.” That’s quite possible. Probable, even. All I’m saying is: Let someone else decide that. Magazines, editors, agents – they all employ young people making $22,000 a year whose job it is to read through piles of manuscripts and send you back letters telling you that you aren’t good enough yet: LET THEM DO IT. Don’t pre-reject yourself. That’s their job, not yours. Your job is only to write your heart out, and let destiny take care of the rest."

More on Elizabeth Gilbert's site.

Of course, this all sounds fine and good until you explore the website of Gilbert's agent and find that the agency "does not currently accept unsolicited manuscripts." I can't wait for the day when you need an agent to get an agent to get an agent.

Stop Making Sense

You wonder if, listening to this music for the 200th episode in your life, it has formed a series of channels in your brain that are reserved solely for it, and for the speckled visual memories of the 200 episodes that have accompanied the sounds.

You know people whose brains are like trunks of treasures, completely preserved and functioning even though their technology became obsolete long ago. Still they thrive, or remain, unmoving and unchanging in the dark, until someone opens them up to start up their click, spin, and whir, observed with wide eyes and hungry open mouths that can't speak in response to such stunning mechanics.

Your brain is not as precious, but having lost such large parts of it for some time, sent by sea freight somewhere not too far, perhaps floating off the coast of Red Hook, Brooklyn, abandoned, to have it returned at the doorstep with the address still legible, is to remember that there was value there, but your brain cordoned off that shipment and ejected it from its pleasant little reality, numbed and unsophisticated at almost every moment.

You return to this music to recapture the nuances and illusions and complex patterns of nostalgia and anticipation that those neurons held before they were shipped off, dampened beyond proper preservation inside a floating, stinking crate caressed by lazy seaweed. The singing breathes entire synaptic connections into your brain, neurons with their own lives and ambitions and ideas about how they should fit into the grand organ, or how the organ should bend to their ideas, their sympathy for danger and tight-walks between a gainful and negligent  life.

Sanity wants to pull you back in, but once you return to the place where only the brain's concoctions have control, you won't have a chance to, and then, perversely, you will be happy, at all times ready to languish in words weak, senseless, or full of promise.

two violins

the heart has a doubt especially for that grime,
borrowed font of dictionary and careful collars.
the organ shuts down its love for a second, as in a
sneeze, to prepare for a memory to turn to garbage,
ash-like and meaningless. But if it doesn't
happen, and it doesn't happen, we return down
the passage, down old dank embraces and
summer perspiration back to this same day, this
strange date of birth, with clouds parting in haste
and changes, always changes, warning us they'll
soon clock us in.

C'est L.V.

Their poetics turn the phrases and keys
of the old and dead, but it is your hand
that renders right the bleak context,
the rain of the artist and his vessel. I'm
starting again, just wondering
where I get off in this listless state of
power or, at least, know-and-love
listening, my rope pulled as a
flailing straphanger in two or three
cardinal directions; household sins. How
much is that heart in your two windows?
Take cover and wrap your new year
in fond hotel-like starch
and conservative etchings of God. I wish I weren't
so selfish unconscious; it rips me
up in cotton strips, just dangerous
as a doll.

retlef dna

this is a
fastened, shitty series of spasms tamed
when you clench down on me within.
some time later on
burly
and sinewy, too. the
heat of the head knows
many scenarios, personalities. we can
recline and remark in this
soft and slippery mystery
until day, or pitch our
remembrance against a bare evening,
two nights in a capsule of ennui
and enchantment set alight. apparently
rhythms can rise, from a crux,
an island, to the stupendous
gift of walking tall on marble. down
the stairs now the fish is ladled into
my gaze: first thing is first,
but i've lost all my numbers, marbles,
a coincidence of the crosstown thrill,
the great drunken danger. you'll see––
or––i won't.

It's hot that you watch football

It's hot that you watch football
and now, it's so not hot. This season has plunked into our ambition
and prodded our timid, leafy villages with ice––it
blights the process of this coffee-bean think, helped by
a procession of ferments to the stomach and
my reason
that leafs
through pages of a neurological diary back to them, back to thee,
to the remnant of skin and slate and cerulean
blanketed over there as I
researched bike parts online. No one does anything
without giving it a link or a hex triplet or some merch
anymore. No one rides this wave down Third Ave past
the vacant house alone on a corner of the
world, boarded up and about to fall off its slice of gravity, without thinking
about their sartorial representation and
note-taking the ogles of this beautiful machine,
this beautiful mobile relaxation––
some peace,
a rolling, wet, dirty snow-rug, pebble, pothole of
this dumb day of the Lord.

opeh

I prophesied something really silly
about your organs just to christen
this book with the reality we made
in the dead of Fall near the arterial
thoroughfare of my latest homeland.

"Don't poop on the first edition of my
novel, please," I told the chinchilla,
undeserving namesake of Dostoevsky's
hero and prematurely deceased son.

Translated from the English by the Author

It's a taint on the fall of summer,
the fake light of nighttime
crawling

onto your green as green goes
yellow and grows weak. So many artists

in this mix except me, and the
dust coating this piece like
sand awkwardly, messily baking
love on the coals

by the sea.

Sometimes in dreams pleasantries become

a deathly dread, a necessary
changling, but it's then

that the
luxury of hate is birthed, is
thriving. Opened ears expel it
out to the rubble of shed trees below

and the demolition of old
artifacts we once made in a coma
of oils

now

a collection, encased,
to live in.

I'm a Big Kid Now

It is a rich match of brick to tree
and to wince at the pulse of
desire is a joyous suffering. It is
a music box round fit for a film
that I sent to you, and in a second,
returned to the window, the
whole scene had changed, or
it was the screen of seeing light and then
turning away. This: this: this is all
I wanted from this day, no oration
to the sun-like waxing gibbous but
to dribble on with the healing
lips until the other element
tips and drips back into this one,
coffer to coffer, eye to eye
to eye to eye.

These are your songs going on without your ears, the dress fitting around the waist like she came to fit in it later, a bristle of fear skirting around her lips until some airy future that looks good from here. No tracking, no notches to convey this theory to its beauty-truth duality, just a fringe of fresh-cut, soothing, dewy, merry love-making.

Puce

A spartan approach to the woolen charm in the
apse, a broad attack on the hearty soul, the mirth of the union of hair.
What is void was
so dull and sensible is
now the ideal angles of high cheek
and gaping, given word. There
brimming over the chipping, watermarked
surface of rest and sign the great
fabric riven by tradition stays until
closing, folds its saplings in
a sturdy, soft dugout, a done
and dined dwelling, a grin
that swells the drop up to ground, dusted off now and gone home.

The Book of Bob

Things of seminal urgency, part 88:

1. Color of Vince Vaughn's Eyes
      a. I told you guys he was going to be big.

2. What whitey woman has to say about poetry or, for that matter, poverty.
    a. 'whitey' means "was never poor," as opposed to translucent or butter, cold and poor. Translucent is like sea glass held over pond scum or if it could float on it. Now, sea glass at the bottom of the pond, that's like a dead homeless person, and they know. Butter is like beer after a Guiness bath and they are alive after that bath, really, really.

Triax, Structure IV

For brutish, tiny
amygdala diarist with capitals
to make greed incorrigible reverence, envy.
Yes, so in a midst, so in fits and
squeezing fear between the skull
like hand over bad kind of light bulb
but brighter, warmer, see how
in spare time you think you're learning
about Eastern religion but standing
so close to you, the Iroquois on
the halfpipe of your ride home is
really creeping you out. Harmless
baby fat pinched in the closing door oh––
come on.

3007

Dull it, my transience on all this synthetic worldliness,
a night unfettered, trusted in certain arms, given round to the
jinx that quenches evenings and brands me with the
zeal of the tendon awaiting a spin to a pull, a power,
and travel like that drivel. I'll have that brandish of wit and limb
across limb and circumvented unsullied skin, and I've
a fierce little expressionless set of innards that I sent
downriver to some idiot burbling mirage of my foreign,
other seasons. Winter becomes the window and the
artificial at this hour, so become yourself, keep coming
out of retirement of yourself.

Left Side of the Chest is where the Heart is

Peter Lake is him is
a stranger is
this strange? A battle has
drama to wit as
weapon, a weapon I am to a hymn. Bring
a bounty in the myth and take out
the myth to run home in a
cloak I'm wearing him in. Begging
to use my brain, cortex pulsing in
anticipation, fermented in a non-night
the exhale and the reason to exhale
is a ballad and a ballast in this
this torn leaf morning. But it feels like:
subsumed and driven in a
ditch to surrender, to ask from this
mud-hole down in the ground is winning the last
level of the game?

Hi, %n, I'm in a meeting

A friendly reminder of
power and life gone, a summer
of confusion lilting in a
snow drift and weeping,
dripping. Because of you, a muse
beneath a shadow and
a cheek upturning. Tell me on
a marble floor in a step
so long, and follow grace with word;
forget the delicate motion of
skin, envy and skin, envious skin.

āwōgian

cloaked and timid and wanting stocks in the future
strutting over confident now stumbled in the retreat
of a fine and barren masterpiece. to clutch, to convey,
to huddle and sigh in place; I spend most of my days
around a pine tree dancing reverent circles round a
man-machine of ambition, passion and hate. Spare
treacherous electric and sedentary prose from my wake;
still alive I seek a bit of a robot's verbiage to thrive.

Still Life with Wasa Sourdough Crispbread and Thesaurus

It is night, so our sea strikes its pose against
the wall to walk
as a widow cascading grief down south
to the melting pot of "death to America," where
sits
I don't know, an orphan book, a favorite
bar and
a pretty pallet of moods. She warned me; I warned
myself, confounded space on the shelf if––
if I could turn sideways and just ambush the verbs with
my eyeballs. I've got the adjectives
all ironed out. Tomorrow: gun, gate––
sit away
from your passion-adoption and swill
until the bubbles float from recto to
verso and carry so light, so careless, so interrupted in
concentrated misery, to
affix, licked, sealed and stamped, away
to some better bed, some fluff-fate where windows envy
neighbors and never
quite wipe clean.

The Chair

The receptacle for your thinking cap
I've been thinking about
for a year is
still in a store somewhere, wrought and
soft and waiting for me to come round
to compromise and get
as soft a cheek to
settle on yours and your
remarkably wide shoulders.

A message
on a string with no tin can at the other end––
vanish in
to some work week and autumn din.
I didn't know you then. But until
another,
some evasive season and cold
that hurts an open smile
again
I'll have
a cider to quench my nerves
and your habit to join
to my lips, a hiss
to kiss.

Beneath my rails, embers
of a dirty profession:
a Sunday,
a Sunday,
a seventeenth
Sunday, with all those steps
and debates writ in green and
the envy of hating
one, hating two, hating something. Green
as the loss of a season, of
a thing I think
I want, of a lost
number, of the window
in which I see a new friend but can't
can't justify erasure––
of a kind of sad rapture, of a kind
of happy seizure.

the car you can't avoid

To that prose, agoraphobic behind the skull-vault:
unless you seek not a sound, speak to these dull
hours and achieve and be heard and observed.
A little propriety to punish and glass to free; worse
has occurred to you––to leave.

for that corner I would trade my funds of pun and flirt
the seldom wisdom creeping in the hair, the boldness.
Alone today and expelled to the reaches of this, to quit
the sounds that seem to expel loneliness but don't. The
cocktail is not working if I painted my museum in the
fond colors of a room, a bedroom late at night: the keys
decide I'm fighting for your night in mine, my life, but
in silence I keep seeking that full and captivating sphere
of such nebulous,  nutritious gain between a frame and
a friend.

a pagan occasion

I wonder what superior tastes will dupe me
into a little bow at soft feet, your cascading
face, this time. I'm mired now in some thing,
something about a calendar and that impossible
flora eating ice alive, finally really meaning it
at yes, a fine time of year.
                                               Into our elbows it
corrupts the fake strains we use to support
ourselves in the cold. I promise without drugs
that's my next task adjacent to this laundry-
kneading, this pulse. Stupid––
                                                     the din of low
quality around rough edges of white noise.
There is sense in that Anglo-Italian echo
in a fountain, pretense of nighttime, '60s mid-
range, and I'll keep groping at its fixed gaze,
the softest animal dancing and hopping round
my ankle,
                 a kind of romance that moves like a
tide in, out, creeping up to the breakwater,
ever higher, over an entire summer.

mind-blind

Your scent basking in this atrophy, your little pace
of sun-afternoon steps and handling of face
in the high noon until these days are gone.
Without the tallness I laugh, without
the chaff I think of other songs to pray to my
clouding screen. Bring me in. Without
your apathy I have no hands to shoo my groove
from scent to lips to truth and molasses friendship.
Other days we will continue this, no quickness,
no plebeian diss.

more poetry - sorry

This instrument, pen of old activity
in that town
still drifting
crept in the hillock of my dream
wool
and a uniform future
and an exaltation to keep you here.

Endorse insanity
to feel ill down
or up
and I will transform my eyes to a radar of where
your fingers go, edits of verbs and the verbal turns

to make me laugh.

I’m still going mad
now still
in a state to coax another soul
since
sometimes
lukewarm is the key
to all my mythologies.

Première

Not remembering so much as reminiscing
only one of these is
accurate.
your substance lies
through my opalescent little shorn teeth
that wink their beauty through
a storm of blues and
bruise-mauves.

On a hill all we did was roll the dough
of old loves,
petrified of
the present and future tense, my soulmate
scarecrow, I could write
so many dirges today because
I'm sinking like marble in new orleans; no
heave in the bodies, just a slow
sustain of light and cylindrical
traveling.

Poor breaths wasted on thinking
about our false
family and
our snow drenched babies. What's love aborting
but a little prick of the
skin? I dream this and this:
that I bash my head on
the metal heater, punishment
I neglected to give myself. This time,
this time.

Performance poor and sinister, drives long,
nervous and cool,
depression-dread of new and noble weeks; we
wanted to be serfs in this
yuppie surf, but I've clutched my
IT acronyms
like photographs in a
fire and run away.

Deuxième

A granite counter on which to chop and sear reserve, a seat on which
to soak tannins and lick against the confident epi-
dermis and its
subsumed nutrients.
Today was a day of lyrics and dialogues about stupid lyrics; I'm
keeping my mouth open tonight to catch the spirited dust of
your thoughts, which will some-
how wind down the island to my
green and nurtured end of the thing. The end of this
thing: the fake star was only a
premonition of my unfair disdain. What should I
really care about a community
if it isn't bothering me? You taught me this, a
platitude of great depth, an unknown,
until now unseen and therefore
glorious sea creature depicted in a silent scene of a
climb to the
dénouement of a
Pixar movie.
What a life! A metaphor too vast, and too many passionate
uses of proverbs to fit your sweet
into my sweet and goofy to goofy.
Sure he'll meet somebody; they'll all meet somebody.
She said in sexiest
sashay, Tell me
you're that some-
body. Could not confine my speech to your collar though
I might briefly try. Prices drop and
friendship grows; it's the anticipation of the vaguely
imagined real thing, ce qu'on aperçoit;
il n'y a pas de mots pour ça, mon âme.
Tu me pousses, lentement, douce-
ment, âme de
trop travail, je te pardonnerai, je pense, pour tout.

Troisième

Est-ce que je connais bien
ce que je portais dans ma coeur?
Un homme, un garçon, une fille,
une maladie magnifiée comme un petit horreur,
un petit monstre comme ceux
qui se trouvent sur des portes.
Je m'en débarrasserai tout de suite.
Voilà, je me souviens beaucoup;
je me souviens presque tout.

t.m.i.

Weird perfumy taste on vitamin found in purse; only know this because I ate it.

Phone is guarded by a gargoyle receptionist: friendly, hygienic, with great attention to detail. Phone clicks and muffles between rings two and ten, then the human hiss.

I'm considering a hiatus from the music biz, but where are women most needed? In cruxes of 1 MB Word documents of near-finished novels––messes? Or on the sphere where there's currently a handful of us, mulling and listening.

Five was guarded by a page, I remember the feel of that page. A parchment against which I shuffled my own face. Almost better to feel through a millimeter of separation, a thread-thick memory of distance. There was some extraordinary temperament, like a dream dog––a high-class mutt––that trotted between us and only let up eventually. I remember exactly what I was wearing when it did. And in any case, I thrust my body to a front seat of the classroom. Would not miss that class even in the event of tragedy, which that was. (Recorded, too, for later horror, or relief). Even my professor knew I'd changed, or sunken like wet dirt, waiting for the sun to harden me up again. It didn't come for a long time. London felt colder than New England because it was so damp. My father even wore gloves. I slid my hands like letters into envelopes in the fake sheepskin of my coat, beige, from the mall in Nova Scotia. I wrote a story about men, and I saw its protagonist everywhere: outside Harrods, waiting for his wife, down the end of Kensington High St. where nothing much happens. Then years or two of strange resilience, theory and little real proof. In that green leather jewelry box of my 'tween years eventually I'll find you: you as broken watch, you as solitary earring, you as soap bar in shape of polar bear.

Stared out window for hours like Alzheimer's patient. If there were something educational on my ceiling these hours wouldn't seem so sedentary. A crazy motto I seem to be living by is, If thou doest one thing today, run.

Runnest.

From Me to You: Fake Craigslist Ads

CD Owner looking for help

Hi ,I'm looking for someone to manually insert my CD collection into my computer and select the approrpiate CDDB information for each album: then eject each CD when its burnt, repeat.  Sounds stupid but I have like a thousand CDs. You'll be paid per cd, fee negotiable.

Medical consultant??????

I am currantly suffering from lower right quadrant abdomanial pain and am looking for someone who migth know what it is. Do you know what it is?????  Extra pay if you can point me in the direction fo meds.  More pay if you can get me meds.  Thanks!!!!

personal Assistant

Hi my name is ray i'm looking for a female or maybe male depending on age (must be 18-27-yrs.-old if male, 16-30 if female) to be my personal assitsant.  I'm a tax attorney and I also own a nightclub---I'm looking fro someone who can do a lot of paperwork and also do a couple of shifts a week in the Cage at my club. The cage is this thing where people dance, it's above the dancefloor, you know...Compensation commencerate with experience. If interested please call 819-282-9585 between the hours of 6 and 8 a.m.

Freelance media consultant looking for An assistant

I'm a freelance weatherman looking for an assistant to help me with everything from figuring out what kind of weather systems God is going to send us to soliciting and maintaing an extensive client list (40 and growing parabolically).  As a freelance weatherman I work a hectic 70-hour week which involves door-to-door sales, taping and editing weather reports for public access stations, and a lot of "sky work."  'Sky work ' means going onto my roof with a telescope and sketching cloud patterns at 15 minute intervals, usually from the hours of 8 a.m. to noon but on weekends I do it all day until maybe 7 p.m. or whenever it gets dark.  I'm looking for someone who had an avid interest in becoming a weatherman or weatherwomen or person.  This is a great opportuntiy to learn from the ground up, and the sky down!  Hours will be 30 per week extending to 50 if desired.  Please end resume and cover letter to email address below.  Thx!

WEIGHT LOSS NOW. Brooklyn

Are you tired of carrying around those useless saddle bags, ?  Watching Dr. 90120 and wishing you could shell out $thousands of $$$$'s on operations to get rid of excess fat?  Shoo Blaw is a new but actually ancient form of excercise that focuses on light to execessive development of ones' pain Threshold through targeted motion. Combing the arts of ju jitsu, karate, water polo, and power walking,  our technique focuses on  the elmination of unwated cellulose as well as the ancient art of women-to-man self defense.  Our sessions are three to six hours long and take place in Greewood Cemetary and Prospect Park.  No equipment is required and your first class is free. We meet every morning at 5.  MWT in the cemetary, TFSS in the park. WOMAN ONLY PLEASE.

Laundry service

Looking for someone to dress in 16th century garb and do my laundry in a basin with a washboard while I watch.  I can return the favor by jousting with my dog in my renaissance-inspired backyard.  Located in Bensonhurst but I can come to you and bring the supplies and then we can go back to my place.

Possible Sitcom Premises

(1)  He poisoned you with jokes and chocolate on a cruelly ironic date at Rockefeller Center where for hours you contemplated getting on the ice but never did.  You had a moment or two to consider slipping down behind the boards, where, looking up, you could see your date's hand sliding along, gloved, guiding his lack of balance along the scuffed, powdered edges of the ice.  But he hadn't gotten very far away and ducked over, saw you, asked what you were doing.  You said, "Just adjusting my skate."  That same smell: cold, musty, laced with french fries.  You guys didn't hold hands.

(2) You composed a sad Philip Glass ripoff on your $150, 6-octave Yamaha that you called "Improvisation I" and posted on your MySpace Music page.  He was a classically trained pianist who specialized in accompanying amateur opera collaboratives who performed at such venues as David Fischerson Montgomery Forbes Hall, DeVry University, playing songs that hopped, skipped, and trotted goofily along the keys like naively happy golden retrievers. You knew what an opera collaborative was but he felt he had to explain it in-depth, sensing a nonchalance you claimed not to feel, due to a lack of security about his vocation. That was a note you made, not mentally but on a piece of paper when you got home, tipsy, from the first date, thinking, Well, that wine was quite good.  And for the first time you did not equate the quality of the bottle with Fate--did not equate the wine with the date's quality, and thought you must be maturing; distancing yourself from the opinions of your mother, for having such objectivity to vow, with a shrug, that you would never go out with him again. Even though, to be fair, your mother would be the first or second person to say something along the lines of, Stop treating yourself like an "ugly, uneducated person," if you happened to do something like contemplate going on a second date with such a man.

(3) Christmas was coming but so what.  You were thinking of coming up with a new philosophy wherein no one bought anyone anything.  But guilt always crept in and someone always bought something, or you knew they would, so out of paranoia you broke your own vow and bought more than anyone else did so they would all feel badly/infinitely grateful.  For your new man you bought a cat collar that apparently deterred allergens (you were allergic to, specifically, his cat, but not others)  and also a scarf that you told him you had made but that you'd actually comissioned a talented wife-and-mother wannabe friend to knit, having intended to knit the thing yourself, and teach yourself how to do so, having gone to the actual store and enjoyed being surrounded by plush textures and colors, but in effect gifted your friend with the yarn and wished her luck.  When the finished product was given to your man you only prayed to Jesus there would never come a time where he would ask you to perform before him the act of knitting.

My Truant

I grasp an old August, timid, wrested
of chores and frail countenance, ask it to draw
into my gift-ambitions the answers
of old sages to grad angst, hung on stupidity,

crooked on a fir branch facing the tapestry
of the old living room wall. That house was
most loved by a creaking radiator on which
a sleeping cat hummed.  Now a soothing

one-man elegy apes the heavenly soft
bristles of her fur against yours truly
down by the baby-faced legs. 
Shear along with thin skin all the wallet-

sized thoughts of my dead missed. 
Which seeping forfeit yields the most
days I don’t know.  The saline
laughter’s propelled me from the back

of the eyes and the air’s inside, sitting
on a smile.  Words punch in and out
with the methodical motor of my
vapid man-mistake, regardless of this

thinking, sinking ship and this
behemoth missive.  Play again!  Hallelujah
Chorus again!  Sting, stare, decorate,
kneel, clasp, tape, and rip again. 

Before greed was a note to self from ‘92
poised to remind oh-six: little lazy
lady, you still have teeth, and with
reverence do you kiss your year-round

thoughts, and with charm does this
monstrous fixture revolve.  And with fear
does the precious life shroud his shine,
livid though you sit in latent happiness.

Lifers: Maria

Those soggy girls.  Their hair has been in a swimming pool, that much is clear.  The pattern of the see-through shirt is like a tie-dye but something more contemporary.  The one in the middle--how to differentiate?--is the shortest, the most severe.  There is power in her tween uniform.  She can transform anything, even a plaid gray skirt.  And she's wearing the kind of socks that prevent deep-vein thrombosis on airplanes or after surgery--almost.  Hers are sleek.  Like mosquito netting.  But they are not meant to be anything graceful or composed.  She is wearing what she's told to for school. 

The horizontal movement is uniform.  There is no side-to-side.  Does she look uptight?  Tied up, that is?  High strung?  Perhaps those pegs at the scroll of the violin are the curling wet hair tied back at the top in two buns.  Perhaps someone has twisted her ears tight.  But you will not hear the voice in high registers, whining rich tragedies.  She is a human--the sound comes in tenor's register and deadpan.  How she manages to control with that redolence.  She is so dearly quiet. 

Slap her and see what happens.  She cries a lot, you know.  One sob at a time, daily, maybe weekly intervals.  Someone at camp once thought, oddly, that she was going to be "stuck with" Maria.  What a strange stance to take.  Maria is anything you would hope for in a friend.  No, not a friend, a model.  A speaking, moving, thinking model of perfection: look how she created herself, how she has come into herself in an apparent totality.  Yet will still grow.  She can say what will happen, no one else, but there is much that has already been decided--the way she squeezes her hair behind her head, the way she blinks.  People look at all this and are convinced of its subliminity.  No piece is missing.  Perhaps a man--some day.  She's still young.  But how will that transpire, go along, not a pair revolving on a record player but a train between two mountains, waiting at a crossroads for a perpendicular train to pass.  Stopping and starting, breaking smoothly.  Well-oiled.  Where is that station?  She is somewhere far out now, where nothing ever stops, except in accident--curiosity, confusion.  Thought I knew you as that sanguine sweetheart in the place where my brother was the bouncer--the chainmailed gatekeeper.  But it is not her--you are not her.  Maria thinks she is "just pieces of her he's never seen," (Amos, Tori, 1994), but she knows this is not true, and maybe he does also. 

How it used to be: a child ruminating on whatever might be ruminative at eight, seven, two, in the womb.  Did she ever run to hug her father's black coat? the soft thump of bones and muscle like landing off a gymnastics apparatus.  Give her a man in soft damp wool to run into and she would.  But for now she will stare at all lined paper and books nonchalantly.  Her own cares are passé to her.  She rolls her eyes at everything in that space of air around her: that invisible globe around the earth on which we astronomy students are meant to map the stars.  We just want to see the stars.  The moon through that giant optic seems to hold her man, bouncing on the surface.  Nothing is really revolving around her.  She is the iron middle--they are on her.  Remembering she used to think she could dig there, to the center of the world, one little piece of idiocy coming in.  Who let it in?  It was not a man, though she had just come off the monkey bars unexpectedly in a showy escapade.  The unreliable air between the metal bars.  One was cold, strong, the other was nothing.  To impress a boy.  That cold came from elsewhere, just entered into it, dispersed, invaded all areas.  Her hands might freeze and stick to the bars.  She grew calluses.  Who made such judgment errors?  Little girls.  Her meditation had been infiltrated.  The boy with nicknames and surnames and Junior at the end had come and erased her small Maria on the bars, her small body swinging across and down, pulling a leaf off a tree violently and letting it fall alone. 

On the corner now the two friends stare at her like the wings of a triptych, of a mirror.  She would like them to move, for that light to move, to shine off her and straight ahead, or wherever, at another person less worthy or more.  No, someone in between. 

This ability to remember melodies was quashing her.  Her words echoed, rhymed with themselves, but only the sound remained--the meaning faded.  I have to go, she said, moving away, hardening as she moved away, in the eyes of the two watching.  Two power sources unplugged, no potential if she were more than an inch away from them.  Nobody got it yet--that she was nothing.  A figure on an entablature with no broken bits, no charity, no central role there, just unblemished, long lasting, enduring it all nicely by chance, the way the wind eroded the nose of one sculpture; a bomb broke off the arm of the other.  Who is she in all this, the mythology?  Perfect in her nameless place.  Escaping fame, escaping the drudge of poverty.  Making a lovely, serene mess of the middle.  Nothing made her different except an ability to do.  Breathe without sighing, unsickly, and that beauty in fucking up: like an original ending.  All those years unmarried--everyone almost convinced she wasn't happy, wasn't lonely.   

Lifers: Vivian

I'm starting a new series on my blog called Lifers.  Nothing to do with serving prison sentences or lifelong careers in the armed forces.  Just another, more playful word for Lives or Livers which can be confused with the Times Magazine column or the organ and high-in-iron culinary delicacy.

Lifers consists of a little piece of fictional writing © Elizabeth Colville, given the title and POV of a person whose name I select from my hat/head.  I also do a Google image search of the name, and choose the picture of the person I think most resembles my character (irony occasionally employed), to give my readers something to look at as well as read. Sometimes the picture will come first, sometimes the words will, as far as inspiration goes.  So here's the first installment, "Vivian."

It's been a year since I left my husband's house.  I'm going back on his birthday--today.  As if that day matters anymore.  You know why I want to go back, though?  Because the music I listen to these months has not reverberated in any substantial way.  No nostalgia, no quiver in my skin.  I listen to "our" music--new music, relatively--and it is beautiful and besmirching.  I want the besmirching.  A little guilt but something more pleasurable.  Not to him, if he knew.  I say this from here, the boudoir of my shitty apartment several blocks away, but far away enough because we never run into each other.  I make sure of that by frequently spotting him in a contrived manner from a distance, so that I may get my bearings, know where he is and know I must not be there, really. Just a little removed, with good eyes on, open, watching under the rear-view mirror, in my cold, cream Volvo, my old down vest.  My hands fat like after ice skating so that I can't make a fist, like in the mornings, holding nothing or at one time Mike's hand.  Occasionally--who holds hands in bed?  Some.

The house was repainted this month.  I will say nothing about this.  He might think I am unhappy with the event, the color choice, both.  I am not so petty.  But no, I do not much like white on my house now that it's also snowing.  I wish I could see the grass, or add the trees, or bring light to uncover the green in the dark green shutters.  It is there, somewhere.  But it hasn't been clear in the sky for awhile now, a little odd, but it's trying to be real winter.  I may be nostalgic for this month eventually.  I will be nostalgic for silence, because there is no music, except looping back.  I have to stop that.  Gradually, so it may look like I mean it.  Not the leaving, which I did not.

September 15, 2005

The Hold Steady: A Tribute

Of sorts...

"Greenpoint"

I was at a bar called Warsaw
Me and the kid, it was a Wednesday
And I guess we were there maybe an hour
And then we started drinking

And there were these guys on stage
I guess they were a band
And the band was called The Hold Steady
They looked pretty ripped on something

We were there standing down by the polacks
We were there, I guess it was at Driggs and Eckford
The music was pretty cool, and the kid
Was pretty drunk, and we were kissing

We were there standing down by the polacks
We were there, and the band went into this new song
And I guess it might have been the drugs
But I could have sworn they just played that one

Me and the kid, we kept dancing
Another sweaty night in some old bar
We could smell the river from where we were
Just some kids drunk and alive in America

By Matt Morello

On Artists

Not to keep on about this chickadee, but I must say, Chris Dahlen had it right when he said last week,

"nobody's going to reject a record this bold just because Newsom uses the word "thee" on occasion, or because she appears in promotional photos wearing a wolf pelt ass-up on her head.  What we really can't handle is escapism. We instinctively balk at artists who hunker down in their own worlds-- especially when they force us to guess what they're thinking."

When I was more or less 'go-getting' at my place of work last dim Sunday eve, I stood for a moment before the window, watched the night fold over and over like coats of paint, and observed the tree in the backyard as my customer jogged beside me on a treadmill, my brain running away with words I hoped I'd remember to write down later.  I was having one of my catatonic moments of "hunkering down," and felt nearly ashamed for it. 

There's a time and place.  I don't get paid to "hunker down," but by God, I love hunkering down. While I do it, I discover new wines,* the endurance of my computer's battery, and the elasticity of my mind.

Try it!

*A compadre in shoe sales and endurance athletics (and hence life, and even hunkering down) recently said, [strong Western Mass. accent], "Wine opens up areas in your mind that you didn't even know were there."  And being a sentimental soul, I've saved all the corks and recorded my visits to the theres.

Chocolate Covenant

The brute isn’t real.
His muscle
is an incident of miracle
and his rage
will sew around us all
a soft string section, a
high school musical of guilt.

The window happens
to reflect
not knowing sarcasm
when it raps a wall of eyes
with emergency, but can
suggest multiple answers and
melodic lines
from which to choose a particular
shade of amicability.

In perambulating off-days
the mind is rapt with languor
and time-fear, but will respond
with a baby’s pleasant shrieks
at the denouement
of hissing neuron fires doused with tears.

Vows

Your proof is bread-breaking,
is wave-breaking
on rock face and smiling
accidents of breaststroke breaths
in the murky basin
before Autumn and the end:

“Do not make drear of the heavy
clouds, my dear, do not make
supple the hard cold
or draw kind curvatures
in a world that wants to flatten us.” 

I will be there for the delicacies
and the fast service,
will improve with age
and harness dancing grace. 

But stand next to me
and stand still in the cold
until I learn to steal
that idea’s soul for food.

Introducing

The moon sits in
to say what our useful
little bulbs cannot.

Music plays
to this tree-morgue,
but it is asking
action of wind.

It’s not our hand
that treats
the air with such warmth.

I did it all,
I wrote out it all
in ink that netted
my bleary joy
before it pilfered
its bones on the paper.

And there
was a greedy give
that nosed the parchment
ground
and up-took my
love, convinced was it
the alphabet could hug.

Dreadfully Wright-influenced

Thinking of that Small Sculpture on the Rouen Portal

In time I’ll enter in
a chamber of
cheer.  Sleek like
your good
reason,

sweet like God
sliding in his speeches
under a heathen heart.

The heart,
it does not cool, you
said, but
borrowed that line
from a star,
eking my
candy care
from a broken basket,
my joy

from a feathered
hearth raised
in an oak.

A peopled field
knows

reason’s in the eyes,
in pinching

close hairs
as they skim, in
a cold body
brooding

for a long song.

My blindness
sleeps on your face.
And besides:

beside my
home
is a biography you know.

Franz Wright

"Loneliness"
(1998)

Say you awake
in the night
abruptly alone
in the midst of addressing
vast stadiums . . .

Or at an intersection windows
shattered your forehead
leaning on the horn
a crowd materializing a light
snow beginning

Like the taste of alcohol to children

No

That with which there is nothing to compare

Say you have no friends, or
say you have to go to sleep

To see your friends

There

It's not so bad
the stitches itch
where they removed
your rage
is all

Where they removed
those thoughts

And no one
misses them

After several weeks
everyone learns
how to tie his own shoe

You get a little doll that looks like you

Rendition of My Childhood Garden

By the blackberries Mother mime-acts
with that sweetness round and
crouched in hand, gleans
the bedroom mystery as the closet-eyes do, drugged,
happy, coaxing her experience through
pleats.  Hollowing three
stories, my maker's a cold dream under
garden bush, above pine.  Seeds spill out
onto the stone and the bird to blame wing-sifts

the air.  A berry bursts its crystalline form and
bleeds out.  Behind that parapet my fifty-something
friend strikes a permanent glee upon a
paw, upon a hand, upon a dozen paws
and hands, her knitted calm clasping stitches
around our garden risks, our clammy
gropes around tree wrists.  She climbs the stairs, lets lie
our procedure in the Halloween wind with fire.

We lie along the ground and see no stars.

Booted feet shove over snow into a perfect
circle; a man waits hapless for his nose
and limbs.  This child chatter's on deaf ears,
voices fallen on ice and silenced, but for
soft family calls
culled and tucked between wool and hair.

Directions: play Philip Glass; think about a tall glass.

The evening grew more sly as the wind died,
but was it not wholly happy sentenced
so, absent of disdain?

It was not in my plans to reach infamy
in this tarred corridor where time
in an instant strikes off whole towns.

I hear a quiet beating through the earphones,
believe it to be the distention of heat in pipes.
I am waiting to find, find.

The sea talks of one true thing, of feet slouching in
with clay, sand, the half-lives of mollusks
and ancient martial artists pricking soles upon rockface.

But here:  I am rounding out dreams on the old vehicle
on one hand, of lesser masses and
living things shyly composing in warm recesses. 

I knew long ago I'd kill with each step
and backtrack in an accidental dance from sand
to street in search of your favor.

You wondrous underling.  Dead awake you stop
all creatures' freedom with your ardent weeding
and your soft rote yawns.

This coming hill may cool, but I have taken the best
of each season to free out of my hands
and into your shrugging winter.

There the sigh sits upon your shoulder's branch,
there against the wind the truth nestles
in sight of all five senses.

I'm going to see Marie Antoinette in a few minutes.

My eyes are sent from the edge of the window to the rail by large hands.  I wonder if all of the person is contained in the hands.  I imagine cutting the hand out of a pattern: here is the dusty soul.  There is as good an argument for it doing everything as the heart.

The television's silent flares wake
the future's flat pool.  The frames skim on
the glassy resolve of
my eyes, peering at
unnamable colors captured exactly.  It is your
candor, terrific and absolute, that ducks out
and into the still picture.  Sly and bright
the mouth of water nips closed its giveaways,
taken to the soft corners where
the gaze turns, slotting this memory in with street
names.  The fairest way you see
is excellence passing,
revamping.  Alone on this lookout I watch the pliable
trees in the wind massage the dull field. 
My blinks are renewals of this lease
with light.  I startle dusk with my swim,
fun and seriousness working beneath
my heavy bones like strong
insects under rock.

Interestingly enough

The greatest story ever told. The greatest movie you've never seen (at left). The greatest love that never was.

You must be really bored. You must be really Yourself. You must have gotten to be really You, quintessentially You, since everything happened.

You must be listening to a lot of Magnetic Fields albums.  Your room must be really neat and tidy.  Your laundry must constantly be clean.  You must be cooking a lot and watching a lot of TV and not have to TiVo anything.

As a matter of fact, you and your roommate have cancelled the TiVo service.

Breaking news:  You are a fucking asshole and I haven't felt this disenfranchised since St. Cassian's primary school in 1989...

...when some boy whose crack was always showing broke the beak of my wooden bird Christmas tree ornament, which my father had bought me in an exotic land, and which I was so thrilled about that I just HAD to bring to school the day before Christmas break began.  And I just knew--knew even though I was only 5!--that it would break.  Perhaps my mother had told me so.

The same mother who also said, "If a guy really likes you, he will do something about it." 

Tru dat, Wendy, tru dat!

Note-taking

Simple simulation has evaded scientist types,
but I wish I had their spiceless precision. 
I've never been a fan of sunshine
but it's not the silly stigma I mind,
it's having a giant lightbulb held by God(ish),
allowing a more detailed examination of inner pain and damaged skin. 
People are so insane. 
I could be the winning ticket in that department and never know it,
because I'm inside looking blindly. 
The curtain, under the pretense of being open, is closed,
and I'm open-eyed, sleeping in sin.

Pasting a face to a window

Pasting a face to a window,
what a sweet start to a new season.
Sometimes when I'm running, like in place
at the intersection of 11th Avenue and 14th Street, I refer
to myself as 'honey,' just to spice up the dross.
You know I still remember the method
with which I tried to own you, two fingers where
metacarpals merge, right smack in
a bit of nostalgia you were entertaining.
Sad and opportunistic, like this whole
dastardly thing.  I've said this before but there's
a text somewhere in which the words come
out of invisibility to suggest with brute
force.  It was only ever words that could
so abuse with evaded truths, and I'm
finally ready for them.  I am so translucent,
but that used to be an 'in' trend.

Wonder, wonder at nothing.
Your curiosity is dead to me.  It's mine
that keeps this wheel and stuff spinning.
Is there any calculation at all involved
in this farce?  I do forever speculate and forever
I will stay away and hate my opposite.

Always going to say, this undeserving hero, that
the only one who sprinkled gunpowder into
the cake mix was yours truly.  But surely,
if you could snatch as efficiently as this vehicle
moves from borough to borough,
or I from bough to bough,
we'd have quite a party on our hands.

Down to the bites

I.

Down to the bites, what's
authentic about this experience except
that it's happening?  I feel our brains
sleeping, I hear their shallow breathing and see the words
bubble up and sink down with every breath. 
I admire the contours of obscure instruments;
I detest our heads.  In place of reason let us confuse
reason with human nature.  I'm warmed up now
and have my palms up.  It's up to you to see them
as you may, in hope of clasping something or
breaking its neck.

II.

We are such excellent liars.  Consider putting it
on your résumé, the superb alliance of symptom
with cause and fate. 
I'm so dirty
but the dirt's hidden when I'm dressed up in another century.
As Isobel in my favorite novel
I am expertly vain.  See how the men
also dress me, making nail-biting suspense
a mere game of eenie meanie.
And each choice's wrong.

Quickly I can draw a line
under words, weak-willed like
courage as a virtue ever mattered.
Smell the whole history of New York, nose to the ground.
I wish I could be so on top of it.

Instead, looking again and again,
I'm a doll you keep pushing down.
I keep bouncing up, not with a grin
on, but at least the sheer guts
are there in the movement.

III.

It's beautiful, my friend, dear,
it's really so.
I could so easily put you on the spot, oh!
The thrill of imagining
today is the day!
Save me from my reluctance.  Give me a reason.
We are the same kind of fool, don't you feel.
Bring that third
back into the fold––see if I care.
Oh, how the fear doubles back on itself,
hope built up thick like a shell.

"Plz call me back"

Your misery is a postscript on
a long, yellowing, rolled up constitution, or
a census of every living and dead human––
by the bye, this man suffered a bit once.

Standing in front of the wall where a mirror might be
I don't see that suffering in relief, and for
once it is a relief not to see that pompous hair
staring back at me.

I refuse to dilute this alphabet soup, to
cut up into small cubes a cortex or two
for the sake of your weak stomach. I am confident
that the other people who want a piece of this are idiots.
Oh forgive me, please. But I look above me and I don't
see you there.  So I'll hold the scepter,
you keep on with the heart.

When you are back in your kingdom, consider
that there are fawns and there is
fawning.  As a great spammer once said,
in couple other chicks looked so foxy. 

A young deer in its first year.  And there is nothing wrong
with the verb if you're hearing it do a mental
ambulation, ceremonious-like, Just For You. 
But you
are a senseless wanderer cutting through paths of
least resistance with cotton in.  If it came down to it you'd
probably kill and eat me, think and say nothing except
I had it coming. 

Turns out I'm turning like a leaf––
the word is also a color and I'm of the kind slicked flat
under foot and sweatshopped shoe.

Of many such scenarios is said, It could be so easy,
but the architecture of great, long paragraphs
is inpenetrable even to me, and these sputters
of loveliness do nothing to demolish.  Get us a fist, quick,
or better, a hundred jousters lined up
against the dreaded written word.

Strive a little against the allergy, and see what
this year's dying bits of world might conjure. 
I'll put my hand out across the moat
and hope to see you walking across.  It would be enough
just to have you at the door.