INNA GADDA DA VIDDA

There are scads of songs that take turns occupying my Most Loathed Tune list, but the perennial chart-topper is Iron Butterfly's "Inna Gadda Da Vidda". Those readers who are my age and brave enough to admit having been driven within a inch of homicidal rage as a result of this aberration of hard rock can relate to the image of someone in a group of middle-aged rock and rollers trying to one-up (or down) each other with descriptions of the most hideous music they've had to endure, only to have someone in their giddy midst halt the proceedings with a grinning rendition of the ultimate Stupid Guitar Riff:Da-Da-DADA-da-da-DA!-DA!-DA!!!!! Rafters shook, babies cried, boyfriends broke up with girlfriends for no reason when the first distorted note squalled from whatever torn speaker was about to fill the room with the quintessential groan of bad fuzztone guitars and fat, lazy baselines simulating what has been called a soundtrack of a Monster Sewing Machine on a stitching rampage infamous Japanese coastal cities. Yes, the song is that bad. Bear in mind that the song was released when I was just getting into the thickest portion of my rock-as-art form obsession and wasn't in a mood to kid around or make exceptions to my criteria about what made for acceptable particulars in a smart band arrangement. It was as if the band had purloined a copy of my conceits and went out of their way to make a record a song contrary to the requirements just to ruin a long run of my day son the planet. Clubfooted riff, bong-fury drum solo, screech and scrape solos, plodding pace. This describes a large measure of what was being sold those days by many different bands, but Iron Butterfly held the distinction of being one of the most universally loathed bands in history, at least in my circles. No one I knew would cop to owning or liking the song --I only found IB fans when I ventured out of my own neighborhood in search of select drugs. What was irritating mostly about "Inna Gadda Da Vidda" was that it was a song so awful that drugs didn't improve the listening experience, or even make it tolerable. It was worse, in fact, the wrong soundtrack for the pursuit of bliss. It was my luck to find other ways to happiness, and better kinds of music in the transaction.

James Reiss at the Precipice

James Reiss’s poem "Bureau of Missing Persons" disguises itself as a Borgesian fable where we have the superstructure and the casual filaments of narrative structure foregrounded, and what we would expect is a clever and disguised fable where once again our methods of explaining ourselves to ourselves and presenting to others is composed of an endless stream of fictions, and meta-fictions pretending to be true.
It is a tired conceit at this point in the 21st century, where each fanciful bit about surfiction, fabulation, self-reflectivity and late modernist pastiche have inched from the experimental margins of literary art and have been absorbed into the supremely commercial mainstream; it’s a wonder anyone would want to try yet again to get something fresh from the ritual disassembling and debunking of the last gallery of useable allegory, i.e., literary style and it’s attendant metaphors.

From the terse whispers of Borges, Rod Serling(our Supreme Ironist and The Only Moralist Who Matters) to Thomas Pynchon’s satiric welding the beams of History, Literature, and Science together and positing them all as manifestations of the human need to create and sustain mythological structure and thus have a means to believe that there is a Plan our random experiences are connected to, and onward through the humorless deconstructions of postmodernist twitches and glitches, we consumers of culture have gotten the message after all. We are ciphers at the end of our imagining, we are cursed with a genetically-inscribed instinct to insist on metaphysical certainty only a means to sustain the race, we are, finally, merely dust in the wind (to coin a philosopher’s salient point), producing books, paintings, poems, movies and the like that get nothing at all except demonstrate our own vanity in thinking we could explain ourselves in front of our Maker should such an afterlife moment come to into being.

Reiss, though, keeps it simple, keeps it smart, and is subtly subversive in utilizing the metafictional gimmick. What strikes me as peculiar, and unique, is what seems like a reversal of the standard self-reflective ploy; where a rigorous and torturously unreadable novelist like Alain Robbe-Grillet would foreground his narrative elements to the extent that his novels were more about the sheer description of everything contained within a writerly frame, items and cracks poured over again and then again from different angles and habits of mind, all to the exclusion of characters, who, if they existed at all, were only cogs in a fathomless fiction machine needed solely to make the apparatus run , Reiss speaks of characters who wish to be absorbed by the machinations of narrative structure , plot devices, and symbolic meaning, those

holiday shoppers, taxicabs yellow
as sunset, and swear they'll find dog walkers
dreaming up haikus, day-trader night readers
of eBooks—all stalking the sidewalks.

In any sense, those being looked down upon, from the conceit of having those who reside in a skyscraper perched library that contains, from implication, the sum of human learning, are in the middle of the roil and rush of life, going about their business, anonymous to one another on the street, perhaps, but obviously coming from places where they were with purpose and now off to other places where their presence is desired, required, in any event, absolutely essential. The resident caretakers of the high rise archive, the presumed custodian of Knowledge and who all, of course, seemed drabbed and despairing given their nuanced insight, thanks to their study of said books and scrolls, that all this running about is pointless and without greater, nobler purpose, look out the windows, over the ledge, mesmerized by the commotion:

In the dead writer's last short story the characters
have no names. They speak without quotation
marks in a setting that looks less like a penthouse
than a storeroom for books and old scrolls.
Still, when they stride out to their terrace
and peer over the city, they swear this
is the ultimate high-rise, the true resolution
to a plot involving disappearances..

A superb and unforced contrast here, subtly put forth; those on high, an elite force anonymous in their own right, viewing the external events as if there vantage point, arrogantly cast as sophisticated and wise, were the only correct perspective, the only lens through which truth could be read. We are witness here to a myopic hubris, the unresolvable contradiction of those with so much alleged insight into how life works that they see nothing at all, that they’ve completely missed the point of literature, art is to enhance life, not embalm it. Reiss puts forth an anti-intellectual message that I find a shade off-putting—why can’t we just leave that for the Rush Limbaugh’s of the world—but he has written a clever, subversive little poem here that finds a new spark in an used-up idea. One may argue with him over a club soda in real time, but there is still the last lines to enjoy, and savor. Hamlet spoke to Horatio that "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy" , and Reiss’s floating narrator, noting the purposeful bustle if the citizens of the street and the contrasting gloom who are convinced that humanity is governed by deterministic laws, illustrates the how the archivist’s goal of making experience fit into finite defintions will only become more unmanageable thusly:


Each evening
the atmosphere deepens. The short story loses its way.

Every night life will continue to unfold in inexplicable complex and unpredictable ways, and the theoretical narratives some of us attempt to tie it down with will just collapse from it’s own bloat.

Clapton: Used Up Before He Was Half Way Through

I'll never say that guitarist Eric Clapton can't play the blues; it's because of this particular brilliance he has in his wrists, where he gets that ghostly vibrato and stinging, bittersweet bend just right, that keeps me listening to him since seeing him with Cream at one of those ballroom dances in the late sixties. The man can play; he has, though, made the sad decision of pop stardom over integrity, not a thing he can be blamed for, since who among us can easily declare they'd do otherwise if such fortune were ours? The fact remains, though, that one wishes Clapton made better choices. This is an old review I wrote in 1990 of a Clapton box set, Crossroads, and herein we find me opining in what seems like the reading equivalent of monotone that Slow Hand was sucking in the Nineties.
_________________________________________

I would have to say that I have relished the idea of having the works of many favorite rock musicians gathered in grandiose, multiple-disc packages, complete with exhaustive biographies, obscure photos and important dates, for no better reason than to affirm my vanity that rock and roll is art, after all, and that we’d better take notes and cram for the final. Reality settles in fast after initial enthusiasm over this notion, leaving two leveling considerations: one, how many of us want to get mundanely scholastic about music that free us from mendacity and two, how many rock artists have there been whose life’s’ work merits obsessive inspection and a fifty-dollar vocabulary? On the second point, one of those artists isn’t Eric Clapton, whom the six-record (four CD) box set, Crossroads (Polydor), manages the opposite of what its compilers intended. A generous overview of the British guitarists’ twenty-plus year career, ranging from well-known songs, classic performances and out takes from past sessions, this collection, over all, confirms my suspicion that Clapton is an artist with obvious and appealing attributes who have been over-promoted to solo-artist status, placed in a league where he’s plainly out of his depth. Consider the sequence. From his early work with The Yardbirds, with their roaring blues experiments and off-kilter riff rock that gave us some of the more angular pop tunes of the era,  and more significantly, with John Mayall's Blue Breakers, Cream, Blind Faith and Derek and the Dominoes, we saw the progress of a gifted instrumentalist evolving in sympathetic contexts. With Mayall, he’d taken on the mantle of Chicago blues tradition head-on and personalized it, soloing with such vengeance, confidence and depth of feeling that matters of race, nationality or accent ceased to be issues. With Cream, he fused his traditionalism with the experimental impulse of Sixties British Rock and, along with Hendrix, re-invented the mode and method of rock guitaring. Through his work with Steve Winwood in Blind Faith (a regrettably under-rated band that was never given half a chance by either critics or listeners) and with late American guitarist Duane Allman in Derek and the Dominoes on the seminal Layla two-record set, Clapton was on a continual upward spiral. In each case, He situated himself among mentors and collaborators clearly his equal who could provide a means for the guitarist to continually lay out his best efforts. These efforts have stood the withering and eroding test of lime, and we have here some tare examples of music that still cuts a fresh path even by today’s’ jaded, audio-glutted sensibilities, The upward momentum stops, though, by the time Crossroads racks pass these hallmarks and proceeds through the remains of Clapton's’ later work. Seemingly embarrassed by the adulation and financial windfalls his early work gave him, the later work decidedly lost its’ aggression, affecting a laid-back manner that was an anathema by his previous standards. Country blues, rhythm and blues, reggae and country western were the touch stones of the new approach, and indistinct olio under which his playing was subsumed and de-fanged. Save for and occasional foray into straight blues, where the essence of his brilliance shone through with no regrets—the mournfully sustained notes, the slicing. Taciturn runs, the embroidered phrasing that spoke volumes about pain, joy and growth, with scarcely a lick issued for its own dubious sake. Clapton seemed all but anonymous through these tracks, It was as though he were flying for a zero-degree of responsibility for the work, as though the previous Clapton hadn’t existed at all and therefore, there was nothing for him to live up to.

Not that there hadn’t been hits along the way, such as “I Shot the Sheriff’, cocaine”. “After Midnight”, “Lay Down Sally”, but even these gems underscore the difficulty. His later career is best remembered more by songs rather than albums. For an artist who’s the subject of a retrospective as exhaustive as Crossroads, with its claim of documenting legend and legacy, the fact that none of my friends (rock and roll zealots all) have been unable to name just three from the scads of his post-Layla releases tells me there’s something wrung with this picture. Boxed sets by their nature imply memorable music... But if a major portion of the musicians work draws either a blank or sketchy impressions on a collective level, we might assume that we’re operating under the wrong set of assumptions. The real problem with Crossroads, is that it doesn’t add clarity to Clapton’s’ work, but tells rather where his bad choices have been over and over, but which also gives an idea of what he might do about his situation. My advice, made simple, is for Clapton to get a little more honest with himself and admit that he needs a band of equals to move beyond this particular rut. It’d be a simple admission that the unchanging core of his talent is as a side man, collaborator and band member not as a band leader. Clapton needs to be a member of a team that plays rock and roll whose whole is greater than its individual parts.

Gibson Drinks,I Don't

Mel Gibson Hits The Bar In Costa Rica
Tonight I celebrated twenty years of continuous sobriety, and it's instructive to see that photo of Gibson, fortified with copious amounts of goon juice, smirking like the clueless nitwit who'd drank again to silence the noise that's clamoring between his ears. Gibson is an artist and all that claptrap, but no one really buys that it is a condition we must accept and tolerate if we're to see him continue making films. The mad artist who is so sensitive to life's crushing awfulness that he or she has to drink and take drugs just to stay alive and reach the soulful part of themselves is a romantic crock fans and some critics have used to excuse the drunk, slovenly assholism of Kerouac, Bukowski and a slew of other sloshed scribes, a generational habit of mind that was enabling in two distinctive ways; it made the artist feel that they had to drink, that it was their responsibility to drink in order to stay true to their art and audience, and it give a perfect escape for the audience from confronting the blunt fact that alcoholics , when they drink, are jerks, assholes, reprobates, completely unpleasant people when they part take of hooch. Gibson, of course, is a disturbing personality and artist whose continuous stream of good reviews has more to with financial matters than with merit, and he's someone given to some problematic religious beliefs that can't help but get him into controversy. The actor/director might well be a creep sans alcohol, but it must be said that having it in his system brings that character trait to full volume. This is why it's instructive for me to see his smirking drunkenness this night of a landmark anniversary, as I have several photographs of myself with that same graceless grin, that same
look that makes one appear that they're being propped up, lest one's face wind up in the chips and guacamole. And lest I take too much credit for the felt miracle of my sobriety, I can see that face and that bottle can be mine again anytime. posted 07/17/2007 at 01:31:41

No poems about Poetry, pt.2

A friend opined over a soft drink, responding to my misgivings against poems about poetry, that it might be argued that all poems written are about other poems.I drew one of my hair-splitting distinctions.There are indeed good poems about poetry, but they are rare and the product of genius, which is also rare. That it can be argued that all great poems are about poetry, I doubt this can withstand close scrutiny.A poem about a poem forms a dialogue, which implies a basis in felt experience. Empathy for the human condition, to risk a cliche. Poems about poetry, as form, amounts to no more than studying the instruction manual and never taking the driving test.It's a form of mystification that gets in the way of good writing.

The point, however, is that what we're talking about are poems by modern bards that forefront poetry as subject matter and hedge on their duties to their craft by euphemising about their inability or their unwillingness to engage experience. I am not anti-intellectual, and I am not one who pillories the Academy each chance available, but there is something odious about the way poetry has been institutionalized by Universities and turned into a Profession, a situation that has caused many contemporary poets to take themselves too seriously, ie, serious in ways that have little to do with art and everything with to do with status.

Writing poems about poetry is symptomatic of this thinking, a tenuous boosterism designed to convince the poet, his colleagues and the small audience for that sort of self-congratulating offal that what they do really is important, it really matters, honest, we as poets have hard time of it, swear to God, I mean, no one knows what we go through, right?, no one knows how terrible it is to bear the strain of having a muse and a Geiger counter sensitivity, you know?, yeah , you know, you know what I'm saying, yeah, yeah... You get the idea.

All this furious scribbling , much of it has appeared here as Pinsky choice in the four or five years I've been here, is vainglory, art without valor, a template of maneuvers where one quite literally fills in the blanks or shifts around some plot points or shifts the expected alienated and alienating effects.It always reads as false, contrived, nervous,unmoving.It is tragic that so many young writers have gotten degrees in creative writing only to write such witless drivel.

blues, bra

The loneliness of the long-distance sophist

It's a slow week, I suppose, when someone has to visit a venerable landmark like Shakespeare and Company in Paris and then attempt to elevate the piece from being mere tourist journalism  and dig out some of the hair-encrusted residue of undergraduate post-structuralism and it's attendant postmodern shell game to argue the obvious and dated insight that the S & C of legend is not the same thing as it once was. Lee Rourke's exercise in summarizing the bad ideas of mediocre thinkers meets, I suppose, the minimum requirement of a blog post, but it simply won't suffice as real thinking. It might have been one thing to simply assert that the quaint shop exists solely as a link to an era that gone past us and it's stock and trade these days is nostalgia, not book selling or advancing the cause of exposing the world to emerging authors; someone cannot be blamed for resenting the way an exotic past one was not a part of ) known only through proxy or through a reading of the literature and histories of the era) is fetishized, gormandized and sold again as to would be bohemians seeking the golden age of deep, envelope pushing thoughts.One complaining of the mere consumerism surrounding the enterprise at least has a foot on real ground and can make a point and sling a devastating metaphor that makes sense in this world, not the reference library.But dredging up the image of the tediously redundant crypto-neocon Jean Baudriallard smacks of preciousness; JB was aggravating enough with his mock oracular pronouncements and anchorless Marxism , and these days listening to those after him invoke his names and his phrases reeks of a phoniness one suspects when words like “Existential”, or even”postmodernism” are uttered. Let this French gasbag remain buried, and let Lee Rourke find a bookstore that doesn’t give him the heebie jeebies.

You eat what you think you're eating: a prose poem

Since this blog ostensibly concerns itself with contemporary poets and their work, I'll post one of my own and invite all responses, yay or nay. This is a nod to my beginnings as an ersatz surrealist, not as an effort to regain youthful vigor and more an effort to recollect the pretensiousness with which I started writing poetry.--tb
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A knife , fork and a cracked plate don’t constitute a meal , though all three items are handy for show, as are empty frames on the wall when there is any kind of company visiting , who demand our attention, taxes, documents of your legal rights, you just say it’s the wall you wanted to highlight, the frame is only a, well, a, well, uhhhh,a framing device!to bring a viewer’s attention to the rub of the paint, the embedded fingerprints, the light switch in the center. Likewise, it’s knowledge we’re hungry for, isn’t it? Knife, fork, cracked plate are about the idea of eating as others go without forks, knives, or cracked plates. Dead ethics professors choke in non-intrusive urns and French deconstructionists blow kisses from balconies and any perch they can secure, Appearances are misleading, explanations are fictions worth listening to for the way the words are warped and wrap around each other until it’s not reasonable descriptions of a material world we are listening to, but rather melodies flitting about like nervous birds trapped in a small cage, a messy page of tuneless songs, all this for a description of my house that now seems to rest on top of a giant hill, bracing clouds and tree tops, a form I’m filling out asking me to describe myself and all the desires I would bring into the world if finances would allow, I would allow everything is what gets written, and everything not forbidden would be inscribed in the rhetoric of future tense, when software anxiety rules the body electric.

OPEN MIC NITE IN HELL

Grank stared at the microphone that was staring back at him, and as his eyes adjusted t the dark, he could see a room full of hooded, shaved, tattooed and love starved waifs and curbside geniuses looking at him, clutching notebooks of assorted thicknesses, scraps of paper, waiting their turn on stage, waiting to see what he had. Grank tugged at his collar, dropped his neatly typed sheets, and began to rant. Horrible feedback washed up to the stage from the coffee bar. Grank made the most of the vibe he’d been given.


“SWEEET NUTZOID NAZI CURLING IRON
MAKES MY BLOOD GROWN WAN AND PALE
MEANING BUSH AND CHENEY UP TO NO GOODNESS GRACES,
LOOK HOW UGLY YOUR FACE IS,
ALL WE HAVE IS EACH OTHER
AND THAT’S LONELY SIDE OF SLABBING TRUTH
THAT GETS MY HANDS TITHER AND WITHER AND GRITHER
IN GRITS AND CROCERIES, ALL I SAY IS UP THE SYSTEM
AND FIGHT THE POWER
DON’T BE SO SOUR
YEAH, MY BALLS ARE SOUR,
JUST GIMMEE SOME TRUTH
OR ELSE LEAVE ME BE
WHAT IT IS
WITH MY RAZR MESSAGING UNIT,
ALL RIGHT??”


Grank was in a trance, raised his arms as if receiving great wisdom from cloud gods watching from just above the whirling ceiling fan that only seemed to make the coffeehouse hotter, he was in the groove , he had the élan from Ceylon, he was indeed the PaduchaBazooka©, and as he lowered his arms and raised his head, ready to open his eyes and witness the stunned silence that was is genius’ calling card, something struck him in the head. He opened his eyes in time to see a coffee mug come flying at him and then feel it , painfully, smash him in the nose. Then someone hit in the back of the head with the microphone stand. His eyes were closed again as he collapsed to the stage and curled into a ball as the steel toed tips of a dozen Doc Martin boots dug their treaded thickness into his ribs.


“Your poetry poetry blows donkey dongs in H-E- DOUBLE HOCK STICKS” someone screamed before they kicked Grank in the head.


“Tough crowd” was what Amos said as he leaned over the table to make the remark to Shelltone. Shelltone closed her notebook and took a sip of her Hammerhead.


“Yeah, these Fray fuckers are a real tense bunch”.

“Uh huh” said Amos, who then arose to get his licks in.

Rhymed poems for the most part chew the root, but then most poetry is awful anyway

It's hard to write good poems, period. I have to admit that I've generally little or no use for most rhymed and metered poems, basically because there are so very few poets who are able to compose as such without seeming like they sacrificed emotion for a metronome and a rhyming dictionary. It is not something that pleases my ear under normal circumstances. Free verse, in turn, is in large part willful obscurity and arbitrary line breaks where the point is to disguise one’s lack of anything interesting to say. The drone replaces the metronome, and a cuisinart of unconsidered images and arty inferences take the place of an interesting arrangement of materials that, though quite different, find an atmospheric and tonal coherence in the hands of the genius, that rarest thing among us all. The dirty little secret is that most poems written by most poets are mediocre, substandard, self satisfied little noise machines composed by scribes who are, to some degree, either delusional or self-aggrandizing

Lisa Russ Spaar and the Leveling Effects of Memory

Lisa Russ Spaar’s poem "I Consider My Mother's Mind" makes me think of something that that has been suddenly and violently emptied after a long time of neglect, a wallet crammed with too many business cards, gummed encrusted post-it notes, receipts, expired credit cards and coupons, small scraps of paper with phone numbers attached to first names whose faces you've forgotten. Or maybe a drawer in the farthest end of the kitchen, just over the lower shelves with the cooking irons and sauce pans , with the evidence of a life lived for decades in the same four walls, with more receipts, creased photos, frayed or snapped rubber hands, recipes clipped from Family Circle, report cards, bank statements, more photographs, notes of congratulation and condolence, an overwhelming mass of paper work that has been confined and added to by a stern-fingered determination to consign these things to the margins, documents of no practical use which one keeps nonetheless and despite the clutter for fear that their presence and life force will be diminished, fall under erasure. This what struck me about the poem, that there is a considerable amount of unattended facts and figuration that have been stored, unrecorded, experience really unspoken, now faded, faint, vanishing with the failing of memory, whole chunks of decades missing between what is remembered not so much as memories but rather as sharp, clear, bright and sense-compelling parts of an incomplete narrative; there is the sense here of what the daughter hears an aging parent telling here, visualizing the details , hoping the tactile bits, the tangible references, can somehow become clear and full in the mind's capacity to form an oracular whole;

Stars of the Great and Small Bears, 

lost in a cobalt padlock above Detroit,

the orient coruscations of car factories,

skating ponds, six-lane highways,

now lumbering across decades

into my childhood suburb, that rimed ruin—

picnic table, dispirited shucks and obeisant leeks of our winter garden, homunculus at the mind's edge--

Spaar’s narrator seems to be interiorizing hours of listening to the sort of wandering, diffuse, grasping monologues an elderly parent might drift into when endeavoring to respond to simple , direct questions; the process of endeavoring to remember what is nearly gone from recall creates intriguing associations that are verbalized and followed on their own. Soon the answer to the question is not the point, and one is left to confront a narrative that is being told, spoken before it fades and is lost with the dying brain matter. One is witness to a personality trying to recreate one's life , to remember and perhaps feel something from the past yet again before the last moments of coherence are over, and the daughter, finally, accepts , grudgingly brutal facts of what happens with aging, and attempts to see the terrain of the decades her mother mentions in various pockets of lucidity.

The landscape is an intense blur , a montage; Spaar captures the feeling of Detroit I remember flying into my hometown where one can, if fortunate enough to have a window seat, witness the industrial city and it's suburbs, a gray, flat spread of factories, suburban sprawl, highways the width of mighty rivers, a hard land to raise a family in; I am impressed with Spaar's masterful contrasting of elements with simple put details, the faceless city stooped shouldered and hardened through bitter weather and economic disaster, and a terse description of a family garden that attempts to thrive regardless of a downbeat outlook. The human element is many-layered here, struggling through the impersonal forces of inevitability and insisting that such a life matters; the mother who speaks of her life in defiance of the loss of re-collective powers, the daughter who attempts to imagine her mother's life as full and real based on the fractured and collage quality of the recall, and a family giving the home a human, “homey” touch that expresses the need for an abode to be welcoming , even in a city as violent and embittered as Detroit.

At this point I get the sense that Spaar’s narrator has wandered the tableau she has mentally constructed from her mother’s tersely phrased murmurings, has allowed herself to feel a rush of sensations the streets, the factories, seasons, and winter gardens might arise, and to become overwhelm, melancholic in what becomes a witnessing of another’s life caught in the movement of small-scale history, formed from coincidences of context and personal choice. There is a feeling of helplessness, of wanting to give warning and consul and coming to the sober realization that there is nothing to do with the past except remember, draw from it what lessons one can, and try to use the experiences as useful touchstones for living in the present tense. But living in the present tense, in the now of the noun, does not sever one from the past and the sway it holds over us, no matter how much be busy ourselves with hobbies and acquiring more material things we don’t need. Some almost forgotten thing will make the knees buckle, cause the eyes to blur with tears that form, something will remind you of who you are, what made you, and will make you feel vulnerable and sense regardless of the layers of maturity and autonomy we grant ourselves.

I can't return to you, though I believe you're calling me

from the polar house of hibernal fear

with its skirted vanity table, its angry mirror

& Bakelite brush, bristles up, still fleeced

with a child's hair, a wavering frequency

in the key of oblivion, mammalian, contracting.

This is the “Rosebud” scenario, where an insignificant detail, a banal trace of material good, arises and is amplified in the waking mind, setting forth a cascade of sensations and impressions that humble you inspite of the strength of your limbs or the power of your will. One learns , if one is fortunate , that the past is always present and constantly influencing the future. The death of one’s kin does not mean that they’ve moved out of our lives.