A set list.
He pounds the dugout
Hoping to shake loose
Grains leaves specks
Something, anything.
It’ll leave a bruise
But he doesn’t mind
Bruises show passion,
At least, for something.
Our souls are bruised
We belong together.
This passion broken mass
That meets weekly,
And groans at itself.
Specks, the lot of us,
Hunting dust, tracking
The fallout of exploded
Passions. The dust
And grains of a hit.
The wind took a dastardly turn
In Saginaw, in Saginaw
Oh it rains x or y times a year
In Saginaw, in Saginaw
I know you’ve had that feeling
In Saginaw, in Saginaw
Oh I know you’ve had that feeling
In Saginaw, in Saginaw
In his free time, and it’s all free these days, he throws together spiders that run databases stitching together relevant data to plug into variable fields in his poetry.
In “In Saginaw, in Saginaw” it queries for the average yearly rainfall for Saginaw, for Saginaw.
a new poem, then,
without tangle
or predecessor
a true poem
born now as
mosquitoes bite
and sweat beads
and I’m not thinking of you
before the sun slips down
breathless and weightless
our story played out
against the night sky
I can’t help slipping into it
it’s a natural law here
momentum, inertia,
trajectories too expensive to alter
the moments sweep past
you and you and you
against the sky
a prologue, then, or epilogue
Your love is plumb round
The planet from you
And you got water to collect
For Earth, they ran through
Their supply allotment
Long time ago
And it’s on you
And your love is plumb round
The planet
Also collecting water
For home.
But no one thinks about love
As they dismantle the Jewel.
How I manage to stay on my feet durning performances is by clinging to the wall.
I pull myself up, handhold by handhold.
Words crumble and fall around me. I look for a path and follow its logical progression.
It’s scary, but there’s always another word where you need it.
Sometimes you have to make do and grab at the next best, and the next, and hope,
that when you slip,
you can grab another word and ride it to safety.
Myself, then, is a path of words that manifests in performance. Myself is maintained word by word, for as long as there are words.
But what is myself in wordless times? In silence and solitude, I pace and drink coffee and commune with dogs. Myself blindly balances on a single foot and finds that, by strumming or muting invisible lines of tension, pain can be, not averted, but channeled, partially, elsewhere in the void. Myself is a silhouette in a blue sky, tensing and relaxing without words.
