skonen_blades | Entries tagged with mashed poetics

Every so often, there's a night called Mashed Poetics where this house band covers an entire album and a group of poets are assigned, in advance, a song from the album as inspiration to write a poem. During the show, it goes song, poem, song, poem, song, poem. It's really a great night. This time, I was invited to the show based around Midnight Oil's album Diesel and Dust. The song I was assigned was Whoah. The album is heavily left leaning and critical of the Australian government and in particular it's treatment of the aboriginal people. Lots of echoes to work with in terms of our own surroundings here in BC and Canada. So this is the poem I wrote inspired by that song. It's spoken from the POV of a colonizer.

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I cut down a forest to build a church
I cut down that church
Ground it into sawdust
Added water
Flattened it into paper
And made that paper into a bible
I ripped out the pages of that bible and folded them
Into origami children and animals
And I set them on fire
I spread those ashes on the ground
Trying hard not to think about the feeling
Like maybe
I had cut down one church to build another one
So far, the trees haven’t grown back
But I pray every day that they do
Because I still have the axe
And the word of god in my mind

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Here's the song if you want to check it out
https://youtu.be/QUATwzVmvLc

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Parents

The word swoops in on stork wings, causing terror in some and the deepest love in others.
They’re walking into autumn.
Parents
The building blocks of a person’s life spelled out.
They’re living an eclipse.
They’re half human and half ocean sunset.
Waters best treaded lightly.
The light that burns half as bright burns twice as long.
Or so they hope.
In the best worlds, the word parent is a synonym for safety.
A word that sparks all the gratefulness possible in a person.
Tinged though it may be with lifelong frustration and resentment at the edges.
Bridges uncrossed, gulfs unbridgeable, and sailboats engulfed.
Parents
Playing dead so well they’ve gone full method actor.
This is their impression of a clothesline.
Call them scarecrows
Call them paused
Call them slow motion.
Call them the missing teeth in some people’s mouths.
The reason for some people’s sharp corners.
Not everyone’s cut out to be a parent.
But when a parent gets it right, it’s a tower that reaches the stars.
A happy javelin thrown into the future.
The word should be in the thesaurus under caring
Under security.
Under comfort.
Under undiluted, unconditional love.
You never stop being someone’s child.
And they never stop being someone’s parent.
A good parent should be a pillow for your heart to go to sleep on.
And a drive to keep you focused in the day.
Parents try to get it right and often fail.
Like your friend’s did.
Like yours did.
Parents need to be ‘used condom is half-full' kind of people
This is their impression of an empty bucket.
Watch them be parking lot.
Watch them be low tide.
The living embodiment of a discarded air guitar.
They can't breathe underwater but they can hold their breath for 45 years.
Let's flip a coin and disappear before it lands, they say.
Let's climb into Schroedinger's box and snuggle up with that cat, they say.
Parents embarrass their mirrors.
Parents are war zone pillow fights.
They’re aging into irrelevance and maybe the most alarming thing about it is that they don’t mind.
No panic.
Just patient sinking.
Just love for friends.
Just quiet desperation.
Just tombstone lullabies for old people.
Don't get them wrong.
They love life and they’re not going anywhere.
It's just that they put down roots in the path of a forest fire.
And when it comes to a broken life, it’s hard to say that it was the thought that counts.
I have heard it said that If one is a bad parent, then it doesn’t matter what else one does well.
I want to say all parents have always been there for their children.
I want to say you’re at ease around yours.
But that’s for the greeting cards and the happy endings of sitcoms.
The truth is darker. Different. More complex.
The most you can ask of a parent is that they did their best.
If their best was good enough,
Then you have reason to be grateful.

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The shadow of what I’m perceived to be is growing longer than the part of me that casts the shadow. People want who I was, not who I am. Used to be thin, used to be a dancer, used to look forward to the future, used to chase.
The talent I have pools in my extremities. Regular exercise just makes me tired. I see the whippet thin replacements walking around like they’ve got forever and it makes me happy. The future is slowly being poured into new heads while we of the last generation pass on our outdated knowledge to deaf ears. Just like our parents.
My life is measured in different chapters. It’s a ghost-written autobiography. Each chapter plays out like a DVD biopic that gets most of it wrong. A life can’t be summed up. But everyone wants the short version. An amusing anecdote with no black ice. No sneak attacks. Palatable and fit for public viewing. Not unlike a tidy corpse.
I’ve truly forgotten heights that a lot of people will never reach. Truly. The mind is a rebellious bastard. Memories fade, leaving me wondering why I did anything in the first place. I’ve striven. Sure. I’ve competed. Yeah. I’ve struck while the iron was hot. Did me a great deal of good, too.
But so what?
My face adorns bookstores now. My words drip from the lips of pundits and scholars. My smile still charms from the cover of bus-shelter advertisement posters. The picture’s ten years old, though. Even I look at pictures of myself back in the day and marvel. I was really something.
Fame presents you with an immortal version of yourself you can’t compete with. A mirror universe doppleganger that has trainers and makeup personnel. An always-fresh idealistic avatar created by public perception. It makes balancing on a pedestal look easy.
It’s a suit you used to put on but not so recently, it ceased to be comfortable. It’s too tight, for one thing, and that makes it hard to breathe. Sometimes the eye-holes slip and your vision is impaired. I let the backup dancers do the high kicks these days. Every time I’m onstage, every time I’m talking to an audience, every time I’m signing a book or listening patiently to someone telling me that I’ve changed their life, I feel like it’s Halloween.
My past self, prettier and better at everything, is tying me a noose and winking at me. It was adept at battle. I am fat and ready for the fire now.
But I have not stopped being profitable. I’m one of those whores that you see on the way down to the bottom of the stairs. There are bucks left in this old horse. There are dollars to be wrung out of my dirty laundry. There are cents in the couch cushions for the cops to go through.
It’s the agony of being loved. And I did it all voluntarily. My fans are cupids shooting arrows and I am my former self’s meat shield. For someone who doesn’t exist, he sure does rule my life.
I suppose in that way, it’s like a religion. The cult of personality made flesh. In my nightmares, he stares at me with pity.
Our younger self, who art in hyperbole, hollow be thy name.
Crowds that love you are vampires and you come to miss them. When the roaring of your fans dies down, you can really hear what little goes through your skull. It’s a sobering experience. It’s why substance abuse is so rampant in celebrities.
We can’t live up to your expectations. You are the farmers milking our souls dry. We are embarrassed every time the light hits us. And it only gets worse.
I am an animated corpse. You, my fans, are necrophiliacs.
Buy my books. They are my flesh. Buy my music. It is my soul.
And maybe, just maybe, with the blood smearing your wolf-in-sheep’s clothing mouths, I’ll escape you while you’re newly fed.
And sneak into new headlines to sell a final thousand newspapers, a new box set of my work, and some posthumous lifetime achievement awards.
And I’m still grateful. I am so insecure that I’m still grateful.
Look at me. Look at me. Look at me.

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Last night was the fifth Mashed Poetics. This time, it was The White Stripes. The cover band Black Math played the album ELEPHANT in its entirety while poets spoke poetry inspired by each track before that track was played. I had the honour of being called in at the last minute to perform with the song Hypnotize. This is what I came up with. It seemed to go over well.

The entire night was nothing short of amazing. I saw tap-dancing poets, ventriloquist poets, duets, and some amazing music with our own Sasha Langford on the drums and Spillious on the mic. Fantastic night.

Anyway, here's my piece inspired the White Stripes song Hypnotize. I tried to make a piece that would lull the audience into a trance and the ending ends up becoming the count off for the song to begin. There's video somewhere but for now here's the piece.

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One. Two. Three. Four.
One. Two. Three. Four.

One. Rhythm.
Two. Music.
Three. Mesmerism.
Four. Hypnotism.

Movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements. Ring Ring.

Music. From the Greek mousike “art of the muses”. Music is an art form whose medium is sound. Pitch follows melody matched by harmony influenced by dynamics modulated by timbre and given texture. Hello?

Franz Anton Mesmer was a German physician and astrologist who invented what he called animal magnetism. He saw health as the free flow of the process of life through thousands of channels in our bodies. Illness was caused by obstacles to this flow. Overcoming these obstacles produced crises, which restored health. What are you doing tonight?

Scottish surgeon James Braid coined the term ‘neuro-hypnotism’ around 1841. Nervous sleep. Nervous from nervous system and the greek god of sleep Hypnos. It gave rise to the words hypnosis and hypnotism. I want to hypnotize you baby on this telephone.

Rhythm recalls how we walk and the heartbeat we heard in the womb. Our sympathetic urge to dance is designed to boost our energy levels in order to cope with an animal chasing us – a fight or flight response. From a less darwinist perspective, perceiving rhythm is the ability to master the otherwise invisible dimension, time. Rhythm is also rooted in courtship ritual, in the act itself. I want to hold your little hand.

The creation, performance, significance, and even the definition of music may vary according to culture and social context. Music ranges from strictly organized compositions through improvisational music to aleatoric forms. Music can be divided into genres and subgenres, although the dividing lines and relationships between music genres are often subtle, sometimes open to individual interpretation, and occasionally controversial. We call these dividing lines White Stripes. And though I knew you weren’t at home, I didn’t mind so much because I’m so alone.

In 1768, when court intrigue prevented a performance for which a twelve-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had composed 500 pages of music, Franz Mesmer arranged a performance of the opera in his garden. The scandal that followed Mesmer's unsuccessful attempt to treat the blindness of a female 18-year-old musician led him to leave Vienna in 1777. Mesmer would sit in front of his patient with his knees touching the patient's knees, holding the patient's thumbs in his hands, looking fixedly into the patient's eyes. Mesmer made "passes", moving his hands from the patients' shoulders down along their arms. Mesmer would often conclude his treatments by playing some music on a glass armonica. If I can be so bold.

Hypnosis is not a form of unconsciousness resembling sleep. It’s a wakeful state of focused attention. Skeptics point out the difficulty of distinguishing between hypnosis and the placebo effect, proposing that hypnosis is so heavily reliant upon the effects of suggestion and belief that it would be hard to imagine how a credible placebo control could ever be devised for a hypnotism study. In 1994, Irving Kirsch proposed a definition of hypnosis itself as a "nondeceptive mega-placebo”. I want to spin my little watch right before your eyes.

A rhythmic unit is a durational pattern which occupies a period of time equivalent to a pulse or pulses on an underlying metric level. The study of rhythm, stress, and pitch in speech describes three categories of prosodic rules which create rhythmic successions. Cumulation is associated with closure or relaxation, countercumulation with openness or tension, while additive rhythms are open-ended and repetitive. This method cannot account for syncopation and suggests the concept of transformation. Actions speak loudly like words. Just think of all those guys who would tell you lies.

Common sayings such as "the harmony of the spheres" and "it is music to my ears" point to the notion that music is often ordered and pleasant to listen to. However, 20th-century composer John Cage thought that any sound can be music, saying, "There is no noise, only sound." Musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez said "The border between music and noise is always culturally defined—which implies that, even within a single society, this border does not always pass through the same place. There is rarely a consensus ... By all accounts there is no single and intercultural universal concept defining what music might be.” This world is music. We are music. And though I knew you weren’t at home, I didn’t mind so much because I’m so alone.

Mesmer wanted to know why two men who rose to high ranks in the military with similar training and looks and were alike in most ways would inspire different levels of loyalty in their men. One general’s troops would follow him into burning houses. The other would be always on the cusp of mutiny. What pulls one person to another? What mesmerizes people? I want to be your right hand man until your hand gets old.

Self administered hypnotic suggestions is called autohypnosis and may be caused by the rhythmic soothing use of language. Such as saying your name over and over again. Or hearing your voice. When all the feeling’s gone, just decided if you want to keep holding on.

Drums and language.
Music and Noise.
Animal Magnetism.
Hypnotic Suggestion.

One. Two. Three. Four.
One. Two. Three. Four.

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