Joy

Joy is a commodity like every emotion.  In the chemical mix--acid and alkali--it is its own kind of combustion.  Joy is an element.  Joy persists while the compounds fall apart, head in disintegrating hands, holding what turns out to be one's very last breath...

What might joy look like in the days of decomposition?  If it is persistent, it will manage expression--find its laughter, its shining eyes.  Even in the catastrophe to come, in war, in pestilence, in loss and alienation, joy must necessarily survive, a nonnegotiable portion of the human experience.  Sometimes jokes harden on the tongue, something to choke on, broken english.  And yet even wet with this sadness, dripping with sarcasm, drowning in irony, the humor eludes the pain.

Joy is its own sustenance.  An antidote.  A salve.

If I look long down the dark tunnel of days, the future with its closing in, its claustrophobia, there is the inevitable, encroaching desperation.  But joy retains....  What will it look like?  Under what name will it arrive?  There will always be dancing girls.  The jesters are in the wings.  And music makes for a comforting thunder, in the background, heard from my bed.

Remember the origin of joy, its gorgeous contours are defined, described by our suffering.  If the underbelly of this torment is the impossible smile, then the smile, the smirk, the uncontrolled laughter itself all find their resonance, their rich echo, in the vaulted cathedral of that (all-too-human) brand of pain.

The Composer

A phrase occurs to him--walking, sleeping, in the bath--and he chases it down on the page.  The sequence of notes, their repetition, suggests other notes, intentional dissonance or obvious resolution.  What is possible is contained within the composer's vocabulary.  It is not enough (at this point) to find the hook on which to hang a contagious tune.  The effort required--to sit at the piano, conduct a choir, scratch these notes between the narrow bars of this new prison--necessitates that something survive and thrive below the surface.  This piece must be evocative; as it comes--from voice, or band , or instrument--this assemblage cannot afford the passive satisfaction of being merely pretty, or of pretending to be deep.  There is not enough pretense in the world with which to overcome the artifice of pretense.  There is no authentic feeling that will not trump the fabrication of emotion that the cheap composer relies on.
Goddamn it.....he knows better.

Sustain

time progresses
like a minor chord
straining to find
resolution

Zed

Zing
your xylophone with varied undulation:
tight,
smooth,
reckless.  Quick precision
on new mallets
like kool jazz imagining
his garden, flowers
edging delicate chords,
bouquets, 
all...

Plan

This poem will end:

A summer evening, the twilight

striated, green marble veined with lapis and I

am twelve years old, home alone and listening--

crickets, moths being crucified, the semi whistling

along the highway, beyond the blackened hill. 

Through the rusty screens, the fallen

glass of maturing windows,

Janis Ian is singing something sad
and clever.  Some poetry is a glistening 

shiver.  I am feeling 

my flesh, my bare chest,

my thick and tanned legs, the air.

My courageous feet 

meet the cooled cement, my eyes 

the watercolour sky.

Its true, I am crying.  I am

cracked open,

stripped naked, left

undefended

by this song.

Juke

This was a song, which he had chosen from 48 songs, 96 counting the unfamiliar grooves on the backsides, their obscure spiral paths. And here was the silver throat, the pleasure when the quarter--for a moment--chokes the mechanism, a little. The nickelodeon gags. E-8 is too maudlin. C-4 reminds him of a fat boy from 4H camp. B-8 is danceable, aggressively so. No matter--walk, run, or crawl--the end was always the same: breathless, the sighs and whispers, the crackling circumference as the black plate spins, and the unnerving comfort in its repetition. Even the scratches contain rhythm and melody.

But this song was something else: an oxidized coin, an old letter, a man out of time; and it evoked the smell of his grandmother's moldering basement, the dusty sachets in her dresser drawers. This music was music his father--less than half the son's age now--would have sung and hummed and whistled in that little box on the prairie. (The radio did its best to plump up the rooms.) Respiration, windows open, allowed imagination to circulate, the spices from the baking inside going outside; the flowers now allowed to stealthily cross the sill into the claustrophobia of home.

"Everything absorbed through the wide-eyed stupidity of the wantonly naive..."

"Be quiet, Charles." I pause. The whiskey gives me manners. "Please," I add, "Just sit back and be quiet. Listen to this song."

He is still fidgeting. He had a point to make and its stuck there. Between the pulls on his cigarette and the sips from his beer, he looks everywhere except at me. Its not that he's "angry", just consumed with his own thoughts. Meanwhile, I can hear my father humming; I am dancing back near fifty years. This is a crowded fair filled with bustling associations, sounds and visions. Cotton candy melts in the summer's oven (easily) while the starched bouffants of the lipstick girls survive the heat AND the Tilt-a-whirl. And I am lost there for a while, til I realize, conclusively, that Charles would not have followed me here even if he could have. The black spiral maze. The gasping at the end of it. A few seconds of anticipation...Then, the soft clatter as the next 45 falls, and then a hiss, the prelude to...

Dominique by The Singing Nun