HORSE
I know that I’m bad, you sing
My ears, getting ready to hug the night, perk up.
I am looking at a photo on my phone,
of this guy I had sex with, because I’m thinking about the dream I had,
where I show him a collection of these CD’s that don’t exist.
When I open the cases, little holograms of the artist spin on the disc’s
and I introduce them to him
like a farmer does his animals to a group of school children on a field trip.
I can hear you, singing against your wall.
You are my neighbor.
I know that I’m bad, you sing, and you play a piano that’s muted by the layers of paint and wood between us.
I use a stud finder, and mark that lying metal point with my finger.
The place I could never nail now vibrates more than the rest of the wall,
and I can hear you better with it running through my body.
Thank you
for talking to me through metal,
and I’m waiting for your next line.
I’m better alone.
Right. I am crying just a little now.
It’s gotten so late every night this week.
Just once I want it to stay early.
I’m crying because that voice isn’t you, my neighbor,
but this person I used to go out with when I was living in London.
They were a heavy metal singer in a heavy metal band, but I would trick them now and then to sing real,
Not that I could know from where, I’m not a singer,
but I knew another voice hid
far from her angry face.
Now, she sounds tired and verdant.
This voice is a smaller version of her, sitting on her lap.
It tells me about all the ghosts that used to live in the buildings on her block.
But they go on holiday in the spring, so I shouldn’t be scared of their haunt.
After dark, when we walk to her house, several cars parked along the street are spray painted with generally hopeful messages. Red letters, so happy on windows and windshields that they shout at us.
Live forever.
I know you have a pure heart.
I love you.
She screams back in her heavy metal voice at the cars,
repeating what they had just told her.
She pauses, then turns to me and screams
LIVE FOREVER
A damning curse.
I don’t know how to respond so I say it back,
with so much less confidence that I think she realizes
I’m not exactly who she thinks I am.
Who am I to get any more voices than one out of her
if I hadn’t a steady, real one myself.
Her place was bare and warm. I’ve modeled my room now to be the same.
She had a poster, that was just a slab square of thick black latex that she called a poster.
In the middle of the night when she was sleeping I made it into a cape and became Batman.
Where is she,
I’d call into the night.
The cape whooshed and wobbled with the breeze coming through her window,
and it sounded so full and deep,
like the sound
of a large dead horse, sinking
into a bog.
In the morning we walk for an hour to her day job.
I leave to go back home to Los Angeles in a few days.
If I knew how to miss a place before I left it, I would spend my whole life loving.
The weather at this time of year is the stickiest it’s been since I got there.
This other person in London,
came with me
and left with me
both in a very literal sense.
Inbetween and past our arrival and departure
on a dotted line Overhead,
is that same horse before it died,
before it was rolled into a bog,
neighing cries as it’s being stabbed in the stomach,
And the holograms from the CD’s I opened in my dreams are now soldiers in bombing planes
with orange rocket strides
flying to the future
in the sky above it,
because our relationship
was a warlord.
and I want nothing to do with them.
When I tell them that I want to go on a date with the heavy metal girl,
They fling themselves against a street lamp, and put their hand over their head and say
They might as well kill themselves.
We walk for hours,
and the cold leaves stick to the sidewalk
and not our shoes.
On every bridge we pass
They half-climb onto the railing and straddle it.
They start to tip over, and I rush to grab them off.
And they laugh,
with tears in their eyes,
and they punch my arm hard.
They ask me questions, the same ones every hour of every day, on why this isn't working.
They shake the both of us
and I look up and try to find the sun or at least a big construction light behind the storm clouds because
I want something there
Watching.
Maybe, this person couldn’t be blamed in their iterances, because everytime they asked I’d try to say something new, create a story, cry, call a memory, a punch blunt truth, something that would prove to them that what is left of this is further gone and spent then the ant hill on a dirt patch that used to hold a landmine.
We walk into a museum exhibit, where all the world is made to look frozen. Because of Global Warming maybe.
I'm Reading a book called Ice by Anna Kavan where this happens.
The whole world is the worst it’s ever become.
There is nothing
but the woman that the man chases and the man that the woman is more bound to and
the man himself
but he’s so sick of himself.
You can tell because she’s all that matters to him. And Kavan won’t tell us why.
The whole book feels like that painting by Andrew Wyeth,
Cristina’s World,
where a girl lies, paraplegic in the grass, looking through the field into an abandoned home.
“Something in her demanded victimization and terror, so she corrupted my dreams, led me into dark places I had no wish to explore. It was no longer clear to me which of us was the victim. Perhaps we were victims of one another.”
This person breaks off a plastic icicle from the exhibit
and puts it in their pocket.
Later, in the apartment I’m staying in
They give it to me and tell me to stab them with it if they ever act crazy again.
I feel like I’m holding a carrot. Maybe it's the last thing that the dead horse eats.
It sweats in my palm, the carrot, and the rotting horse, small, like the heavy metal singer's fake voice, as I listen to them cry and tell me how this city is making people evil.
I feel so wrought
and so so angry,
As I think about all the terrible things that have impaled us both.
I know that I’m bad, you sing, still, in the house next to me.
But I know
that you’re not.
Maybe I should sing your song with you
or maybe I should go to bed,
and hope that the evenings
will stop getting this late.
GIF from Seabiscuit (2003)
MAXWELL NORMAN’S ALBUM OF THE WEEK
Iceage - Plowing Into the Field of Love (2014)
A ragged orchestra led by a Scandinavian demon claims victory over the forces of goodness and I, for one, couldn’t be happier. This Danish group’s brutality is matched only by their poetic prowess, with incredible images of humans turning into horses (“Stay”) and half-hearted cannibalism (“Simony”). Behind the alcoholic nihilism of the lyrics, the band thrashes their way through a series of punk anthems rendered in widescreen with orchestral touches, like the grimy cowpoke bop of “The Lord’s Favorite” and the cavalry-charge rattle of “How Many”. Iceage’s most singularly arresting tack comes with the gorgeous, faded waltz of “Against the Moon,” one of my favorite songs of all time. Everyone from scarfaced moshers to wine-drunk writers can find something in the Field of Love.
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Thanks for a great time January 24!
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