To the countertop names:
How is the weather there –
where the days are blessed by
barlight,
and the whiskey flows
like water?
Here’s to you,
the faceless –
the happy.
AudioCoffee
[AudioCoffee]: To Be Heard
This creative space is
stifling –
you’ve got all this room to
trickle water out into the void
but the ocean stretches out forever
and you’re fucking about with the sink.
It’s sending paper airplanes with
poems written on them off clifftops
hoping someone’ll snatch them up,
except you’re the one person on the planet,
and you should really be trying
to punch holes in the goddamn atomosphere.
[AudioCoffee]: From Words on Stone
Hello, hello! I usually don’t preface these things, but I tried something a little different with this week’s AudioCoffee. This piece is one I did a while back – specifically meant to be heard instead of just read. So if I sound a little more, ah….slurry, with some of my words, or my enunciation falls through a bit more, that’s definitely something I was shooting for. And, to add for some scene setting, I also edited in a nice little quiet rain track behind the spoken words – just for dramatic flair.
Also, audio quality’s nowhere NEAR perfect. =P Bear with me, people. I’m trying a new pop filter.
Anyway, time to get out of my own way. Here’s the Soundcloud player. Away we go~
So uh,
it’s been a while, hasn’t it?
You look
well.
I mean
I can see the raccoon rings under your
eyes, smell the tobacco tar
on your tongue, and I’m guessing there’s more
Morgan in that thermos than there is Joe
but you know,
you look
well.
Well in that tired old
dog slumped inches from their
bed sort of way.
I’m not…
…doing this right, am I?
I mean…it’s
hard.
We said we’d always be honest,
but that was back when being
honest chalked up to
talking about how much we couldn’t
stop thinking about each other
or
how work was bothering
us more than usual
or how
we were having a crisis of self
and didn’t know if this
was the stamp we wanted
to leave on the world.
It was an easier time, you know?
Back when the sheets
smelled like lavender,
alarm clocks meant
nothing, and the coffee was
always sweet.
You’d be having a bad day
I’d say stupid shit
you’d laugh
and we’d be
alright.
That was the
deal,
remember?
I guess it’s a little harder now,
what with…
well…
Anyway….
How have I been?
Admittedly…
everything seems static
around here.
Static in that whole
grass sits
it rains
grass grows
grass gets mowed
kind of way.
Being stuck in
the same place tends to
do that do you.
You know a thing or two about that,
don’t you?
A big part of me
doesn’t know what I
want,
talking to you
here.
That old normalcy would be nice,
as if that could
even be given.
As if someone could wash
the sweat and ash
out of the sheets,
give us reasons to
set alarms,
and make that coffee
anything but black
right now.
Wishful thinking, right?
You might even laugh.
I guess a bigger part of me
wants to stay honest, though.
A bigger part of me
wants you to just
get you to
wake up and notice
the grass creeping
waist high around
you –
the dust settling in blankets
thick
enough to sleep under.
There’s too much outside
those quiet walls
the shuttered blinds
this rusted fence
to just keep
sleeping it all away.
And your time
is much better spent
talking to something other
than carved words on stone.
Please.
Please stop coming back.
[AudioCoffee] To Pound’s Station
Like a scene from Pound
where everyone in this
station is
an apparition, save for –
no –
I can’t say that, can I?
All the faces
are blurred now.
Yours,
mine,
the nameless passing
around
through
between
cradling it
all of it
and it’s all just
smoke,
blown away when the
Amtrac blurs past
on its way to Penn Station.
Ezra –
I’ve fought your words
since first I heard them –
two lines that,
before,
got only one response from me:
Bullshit.
Utter Bullshit.
After all, how could
anyone even presume to know
how to condense so much
life
into
fifty-seven letters
fourteen words
there’s too much
there’s just too much.
And somehow you packed it
into a blurb
smaller
than an address line.
It’s as if someone decided to write
about the ocean
and settled on
yellow fish.
Truth be told I
still
don’t understand why you
would.
But I get
that you can.
I see how the faces blur
like water on bark,
dropping from the grain before
you can
name them.
But they do have names,
Ezra.
They have voices.
Listen close,
and you might hear it, too.
[AudioCoffee]: Storyteller
See –
when I was a kid, I
used to draw little
comic books
and make faces when
something dramatic came up.
Looking back, I figure it
was just my
head
breaking onto my lips
but
I wonder if little
me really got what was
going on there.
Unsuspecting pup
playing god without knowing –
a whole world
in his hands
before he would even spell the word properly –
P-O-W-E-R
the
means to hold sway
over the life you’ve created
still vibrant
and
buzzing
on lined paper,
blanketed with dust
in a closet
somewhere.
FernwayPress 