1. |
||||
2. |
January 2019
03:34
|
|||
January 2019
1.
At high speeds it can feel like the car is about to come apart. Everything rattles. But closeness can still the clanking bits a little, can make gentle the thrashing tremors.
2.
Night reached the hills first; they cast shadows on themselves below a goldfish sky and we traced the liminality with our little car, puttering between the matte fluorescence of service stations with the plus and super octane buttons blacked out and taped over and the dense woods that have not yet been felled, where the foundation of a new McDonalds will eventually find fertile ground for concrete roots.
I probably wondered out loud about something vacuous; if so it didn’t matter enough to commit to memory; we left the thought on the side of the road, mundane refuse for a boring world to compost, and drove off in silence without use for an explanation.
3.
In darkness, snow leaps from nowhere then disappears again, fireworks dissolving into the hurry we beckoned the gas with. It came on suddenly, God beat an old quilt indoors and commanded the flurries to blow through us; the dull shimmer of a crescent moon; a sunbeam through the window of an empty room; the snow banking and turning in familiar patterns; me remembering again that air is occupied space; thus the air around and between us as a barrier might be.
4.
The intimacy index fell sharply before closing, but no one on the floor could pinpoint the problem. To some it was a mistake, a computational error that scaled quickly; others thought it was a market correction; you can end a date with a soulful exchange of saccharine kisses in a cutely contorted embrace, jockeying with the center console, but only in a bull market would every date end this way—a sure sign of a coming crash. On the days you sit at your desk, sedated into Internet oblivion, you will wish the Fed had raised interest rates earlier to cool the too-hot market, but who has the self-control to hold back when the intimacy is there, beaming like a smile outside of time, like forever, saying your name matter-of-factly and holding out a sure hand. We always say we saw it coming, we always knew better.
5.
By the time we crossed back into Massachusetts we rattled. Perhaps we always rattled. I think it ends there, but it’s unclear. I wonder out loud about what it means to return to how things were, and I conclude that each time you throw a dart it makes a hole; no matter how slow you go; after a thousand bullseyes the red cork will crumble into a coarse turf on the floor, leaving empty space that perversely cannot constitute new holes. Perhaps this is what you meant when you said you couldn’t think about hanging out again just yet. Perhaps the next text will be a small broom to sweep up the turf bits of our bullseye; last call; a reaching finger to shut the lights.
6.
“I don’t want to be strangers again”
is what I said of you, alone in the shower.
Is what I said of a stranger
Off somewhere in her own time
Hanging up tasks in her smokehouse
Laboring over the flavors
And doing the work
Sequential & diligent
Without
pause
Without
Reply
|
||||
3. |
February 2019
02:30
|
|||
February 2019
1.
I don’t know anything about cameras.
Like I like taking pictures, but anyone can do that, albeit poorly
In high school I occasionally referred to myself as a photographer
Like I bought these three colored lenses for my low quality digital camera
But I never used them for anything great
“This picture could be green now!...or red?...”
I never learned the craft.
I guess you need light to see?
Go figure.
If you don’t have enough, the pictures come out blurry and dark.
I was always frustrated by that;
You can see things so clearly in reality but carrying those moments into the future takes patience, skills sharpened diligently on the rock of failure for years,
And even then, sometimes you can still only barely make out the shapes.
Like you have this box, this time capsule that you can fill with curated content, unrefined material for future memories, but when you go back to look there are holes in the bottom and nothing much is there; just a hue, impressions of space, things and not things, scrambled certainties.
The longing brain fills in the gaps.
2.
We bought disposable cameras on New Years Day.
I pull out those darknesses from time to time
Lay them out on my kitchen table
You’re there in the cafe
Only A Shadow
Like the fucking Cleaners From Venus Song that was probably playing
Hovering right in the foreground
A ghost. A friendly ghost.
There again in front of the post office
I can’t see your face
I know you’re there
I remember that we were there
We bought the cameras
We drank coffee
We walked
The restaurant was too crowded
We had a really nice day
But I can’t see your face
I don’t see you much at all anymore.
Just a hue, impressions of space, things and not things, scrambled certainties.
My longing brain fills in the gaps.
3.
Today there was too much light.
I held up one hand
To block the sun
And waved it
A stiff oscillation
And I called the shadow it cast my love for you
So when I stopped waving
It would be gone.
|
||||
4. |
March 2019
01:25
|
|||
March 2019
I reread my poem from January and it doesn’t hurt anymore
It felt like reading something old, encased in glass you aren’t allowed to touch
Like a museum visit
Once I stood in front of the Dexter Street Baptist Church where Dr. King preached in Montgomery and tried really, really hard to make a meaningful memory.
I relaxed my body to hazard a meditative stare
Deep breaths
But all I could do was stand
And know
The feeling never came.
Perhaps the lesson was in the mundanity.
I broke veg and ate half a rack of meaty, center-cut ribs after we left the church.
At the next rest stop I walked like I was underwater
Rib speed
My body struggling for every muscle twitch, every joint bent
I embodied the heaviness I couldn’t feel
By the next rest stop that heaviness was gone too.
|
||||
5. |
April 2019
01:23
|
|||
April 2019
At high speeds it can feel like the car is about to come apart. Everything rattles. But that’s just how cars get under those circumstances.
Even when you think the thing has ruptured
The wheels have come loose and scattered like roaches in the light
Twisted metal fallout and chipped plastic
A coming apart so spectacular that no future archeologist would even guess Car
Still you sit
You’re fine
White knuckling 3 & 9
On a side street in Denver
The closest one you could find that looked pretty enough to be devastated in
Then the phone call
Another phone call
This time the car was still, like death
I guess I never really got over it.
Until I figure out
what it looks like to need a friend
as much as I need you
|
||||
6. |
May 2019
03:39
|
|||
May 2019
Early morning feel my belly bulge
Disused sponge-eyes puckered in their holes
In damaged ears it’s resonating
“time to stand and fill some spaces”
But I don’t wanna know
How this shit unfolds without you
Lonely summer
Bakes a crust on me
Aching histories underneath dead skin
I know it’s you by the patterns of my phones vibrations
I just can’t take this
I make me sick
I’m dipping out of the gig
On the porch with the scenesters talking all this shit
How they tripped on acid like I’m cool with it
The late comers coming up the stairs
I came here to breathe my own air
So I’m out here waiting
Now stuck for a while
You inside patient
With a kind smile
|
||||
7. |
June 2019
02:48
|
|||
June 2019
When I think about being in the world
About the loss, about the discovery, about the mundanity, about warm days, about coffee, and gin, and 8-ball pool, and loss, and loss, and fear, and 9-ball pool, and gin cocktails, about work stress, and caring a lot about the quality of food, and being a body in the world vs. having a body in the world, about a challenging book I just read, or a terrible thing a stranger just said, or space, or 10-ball pool, or the improbably gorgeous water of Walden Pond, or kicking back at a shore bar, or biking in the winter, bundled-up and soaked-through and stegosaurus-backed with kicked-up salt crystals and city grime,
I realize I am thinking of you
And I deny it
And I deny it
And I realize it again
And it breaks me
Like a fresh rack
Like knocking ivories
Cue ball coming in steep, from the long rail
Three finger V-bridge from the cushion
Zachy-style
Perfect strike
Perfect contact
And I scatter
And I’m not anymore
But component parts
And kinetic energy
Potted, piece by piece, till death or cleared felt
Perhaps
Or if not, racked fresh again
And I return to my thoughts, about being
And about being in the world
And about being with, in the world
And am relieved to know
It is okay
Because you
Are here
In the world
Too
June 2019, pt. 2
When you see my posture
You roll your shoulders back
And get yourself right
|
||||
8. |
July 2019
05:10
|
|||
July 2019
Summertime, and the living is so easy that it’s alarming.
Send help.
I indulge in the daily diner breakfast
I drink my coffee slow
I sip long, long after the plates are cleared
And the mud and the mug have matched one another’s temperature
And Julie runs my card, $6.40, two dollar tip
And Julie gestures, lifting the pot with the brown handle
A warmup pour?
You bet your goddamn ass, hell yes!
Summer!
I read on the stone balustrade by the beach in the late morning
I shoot pool at Flat Top at noon, any table I want
A rack on the fast felt
A rack on the table by the couch
A rack on the table by the bar
Read in the court yard on the polywood Adirondack chairs
Work on the tan
I grab an Oat ‘Tado at Pavement so I can use their nice bathrooms
I exchange hellos with the homies and feel part of something
I take advantage of the lunch specials at Oppa
I go to the cafes that close before I get off work
I get whatever latte so I can use the nice bathroom at that kinda whack spot in the old Masonic Lodge by the Common
Goddamn those bathrooms are nice
I struggle to save money
I appreciate my lifestyle
I resent my lifestyle
I struggle to save money
I embrace my lifestyle
I struggle with my lifestyle
I am my lifestyle
I read by the Charles in the sun
I read by the Charles in the shade
I eat dinner between chapters
I get to the gig, I get tired and I leave when I want and I don’t feel bad about it
It’s summer, goddamnit.
I go home when it’s time to go home
Yes I’ll watch another episode of Chernobyl
There’s only five episodes
Save some for later
I park in Central Square and walk towards the river, to the fireworks spectacular
The lady on stage talks a LOT about the military
I walk back
I don’t need to see the fireworks
The summer itself lights up my summer, exploding into colorful bands of my summer, gentle sparkling summers sprinkling into my summer’s summer
SUMMER!!!
I surprise you at your house
And l know now again that we aren’t getting back together
For real this time, as last
Your neighbor’s fireworks make it hard to embody our sadness
So we laugh instead
They just keep going off.
They hit a house
I can’t tell if the smoke is coming from the house
It hurts so bad
But it’s so easy
With you
Even the heartbreak perennials poking their heads out of the soil for another round smile when they remember
We’re still here
We are still here
In each other’s lives
We look cute in our cutoffs
We enjoy the weather
We laugh some more
It’s going to be okay.
You go to bed, sweetly
I drive home, sweetly
Windows down
I don’t relate as much to those sad Pup songs now
And...No construction on 93 tonight
A July miracle
The neighbors are still up
Glass of room temperature water
Yes I’ll watch another episode of Chernobyl
Damnit
Summertime and the living is so easy it’s alarming
I retroactively leave the hurt in snowy Maine in January
I’ll develop the pictures eventually
But for now, it’s tomorrow again
And I crack open a new book
Feet in the Charles in the sun
Feet in the Charles in the shade
And the poem continues
And the poem continues
And eventually I put it down for another lunch special
Or another episode of Chernobyl
Or another callback
And I’ll pick it back up later
I’m not worried
We’ll still be here
|
||||
9. |
Outro to Other Honey
01:06
|
|||
10. |
||||
For Elise & Steve on the Occasion of Just After Your Wedding
The light hit all of us, but at our own angles—
When the moon reflects off of Boston and onto the Charles, it looks like the all the middlingly sized skyline columns of light are pointing right at you, and it feels like that for everyone—
That’s how it was when your light hit all of us
The universal filtered through singular experience
With no loss of latency
Like a modern miracle, but ancient
You didn’t write the vows for us, but witness was as good as baptism
And we were all made holy by your love for one another
See, even there—A Jewish service refracted through Christian iconography
But we’re all on the same page here, I think
Because it wasn’t just a union of two
It was communion, like, with a capital C
It was moksha
We were together
We were; together; because of you
In that moment the only I that could be dis-aggregated from the beauty was as a strip of wallpaper in a room to house the most resplendent piece in an art museum;
*I* became context for Whatever it is that you two have made for each other
I called it love earlier and so did you so let’s leave it at that for the moment
This is all to say that it was bliss to be reminded that love is an end unto itself
And I hope to frame that knowledge, I hope to hang it by mundane nail over every door
So We, like, capital W, We can renew ourselves in the unnoticed passings through of each ordinary moment with the lived memory of this, the day you gave the gift of your love to each other and held high the light to show us the way.
|
The Michael Character Boston, Massachusetts
It's political music, whatever. Based in Boston, MA. Absolutely willing to drive very far to play for you and five of your vaguely alternative friends in your combination kitchen/laundry room. Hit me up. I'm fully serious.
Streaming and Download help
The Michael Character recommends:
If you like The Michael Character, you may also like:
Bandcamp Daily your guide to the world of Bandcamp