Robert Longyear - A Revisionist's Draft
Generalizations
I can be beguiled and repelled simultaneously by the character of my environment. There is magnetism to the visual cacophony of my city, rife with an extravagance of historic material culture. This excess of stuff confronts me, almost relentlessly. While I surely absorb the stimulation unconsciously, I also save fragments of the most personally compelling detritus for its experiential mnemonics and tactile enticement.
Perhaps we are all accumulators at heart.
The selected evidence of age, decay, residue, and profuse quantities of discards seem to echo the energy and stimulation, the problems and issues, the dynamics of a city.
This is the palette with which I corroborate the meaning and content of my work.
They may also imply larger problems – those which all humans share. We all seek safety, well-being, sustenance, and peace.
My artwork is a formulated method of acknowledging the discomforting personal and societal stories of our time – ethnicity, intolerance, impersonality, social ills, and blight.
My research is deeply engaged in the investigation of the particular places that I encounter in my daily life. This often involves the commingling of devastating realism with a buoyant spirit of hope. My works are about our landscapes. I take material and engage it in a way that makes the work rough, but managed, manipulated, made. I take the dynamic, the idea, the visceral quality of the environment and have used it as a formulated method in my work.
Borrowed, but managed, engaged. It’s high end. It’s formulated to be thought about. It’s formulated to have a message.
There is a question, a challenge and a resolution that draws forward, in a small way, a facsimile of the landscape of the made, but makes it manageable, comprehensible, and sometimes small so that you feel the sense of individual maker, manipulator, a personality out in the world, transforming it.
Reconciliations
I have found that I am not solely a studio artist. I know how to work in a studio, but it really doesn’t engage me week in week out. I realize that what I am really interested in is the tourism outside my front door.
I was a resident of Hyde Park, a North St. Louis neighborhood for two years. I was not an outsider or an insider, and I took advantage of a great privilege to talk. What I experienced in my neighborhood was evidence of a collapsed system. My work became about working with entropy – taking apart a system and working toward disorder. The sites in which I worked presented a sore spot. They were physical proof of the destructive powers of the world, and served as a concrete example of the wider context of social failure.
My work became a dialectic that fused architecture and site, living experience, and the making of jewelry objects as artifacts of an experience. This was achieved by treating material on multiple layers of scale and behavior, altering the integrity of built structures as a way to compromise and transform.
I employed photography as an intervention on my chosen sites, and used building material in a way that disengaged it from its original structure and system. There was a revealing nature in their revision. I was releasing associations about sites I dealt with. I was only able to see these things once I had taken them apart, ennobled, and resurrected them. There was an awareness that I was trying to bring about. By bringing pieces of the system and reassembling them, I was able to demonstrate that as the system breaks down, it reveals much about its impossibility. My experiences in Hyde Park have been on-going, open-ended, complex, and suggest that fate is malleable.
There is an urgency, surgical skill, and neutrality to the small works I create. The true message in my work is in the craft and what I can do with metals and material on a small scale. Yet, at this point I could not make objects without participating in these other defining activities. In a sense, I ended with my beginning, and I began to talk about how these small objects have given voice to a wider practice. The work I present here is an attempt to reconcile the evolving concentric circles employed to reveal an object.
Verse / Vs
What’s this mean?
What’s stuck on you here.
Ur car kinda dirty.
Can I wash it?
Naw kid it’s a trainwreck; hopeless.
I’ll do it right.
Let it be.
So um, you an artist right?
So, you like draw with a vision?
Or is it like you just start something and see what happens?
Or is it both?
I just ask cause I’m trying to draw a parallel.
I don’t just ask anyone for something.
That was why I asked to wash the outside of your car.
I’ll make it look good.
All I really want is a sandwich.
I used to do all sort of heavy jobs.
Like lifting things and moving them.
My arms all messed up now.
That looks rough. You damaged.
I got shot, my bone is shattered and I got pins and metal in it.
It has been four years.
You got a loosie?
Where the burglars slept.
Same place the angels wept.
Yo you got Newport!
Here take two.
Really man I’m just trying to get a sandwich or a bus ticket.
Naw.
Just a solid?
Two times two is four, and all it for my four year old.
But I’m just tryin to reincarnate myself into someone who matters.
Maybe she’s you.
Just a dollar for a moving target.
Not because it’s fly, but because I can identify.
...
it’s been all my years since my last confession
i uh…
3 times – 5 times
father
6 times
anything else
yes father – i appropriate things
interesting
stereos, radios, amplifiers
i’ve plagiarized at close range
7 times
blank tapes
how old are you
31 –i’ve been doing this all my life – i make sounds
i’ve committed 32 burglaries – one was a church father
terrible, terrible thing to steal from stores, but from a church; that’s god’s house
i stole religion right out from under my feet
god had a flask, i can prove it – placebo hand a loose cannon evangelist
and this has all been a chance to weave opposable thumbs
is there any way to give all of this stuff back?
and this has all been a chance to take my life back and escape with both hands intact
...
When the order finally organized the storming of the gate
The justice had been redefined for every whore and saint
The able bodied soldiers put their quarters up to play
How much more can the coroner’s office take
When the ordinary people leave their corner stores and cribs
The citizens of earth will put their quarters up to kiss
How much more can the coroner’s office give
?
...
When all else fails drug dealers make the music.
The trumpet calls, and yes yes yall’s; the empress wears a Fifty cap.
Blue in the face angel play the ledge closely. Divide up by fighting tribes.
Watch them waddle back and forth lighting fires.
Flat line fetish had her feathers fanned out.
Follow the breadcrumbs back to back.
Up on your porch,
I was on the ladder walking by my hinges back to the very last rafter.
Bumper cars are only funny when they bump.
Alive with a medicine of mine’s.
Pace like molasses stretch past us.
Night of frozen chills cause the sacred is made outta mud-mud.
...
What’s the right kind of behavior to qualify as someone’s savior?
No mountain too high.
No city to far.
No comma tonight.
No city tomorrow.
No fire too live.
No city too charged.
No treaty two side.
No city to guard.
...
in a world of once upon a times
where babies are born into numerical order
there are things like hip-hop and dead people
we just need to talk for two minutes
...
there’s a new style born of spare parts
an extracted product of streetwise ingenuity
this ain’t a grieving face here
just look at that building woven together from opposable thumbs
holding hands saves lives, and people in a parked car tend to disappear
plenty big enough brains give it up like the day you hatched
they fear us when they groups of us so’s we roam in packs
routes and get aways of the food, clothes, medicine recipe to the vital
...
message by pigeon
nostalgia signals like shrink-wrap-ed
answer usher rubber neck-er double check
same hand, tugging off assortment; five-finger lazy lift
bottom feeder to the meek and hungry dummy-box
flicker latchkey; binding to the wire machinery; running to ‘em social
retardation plug in the wall
– clumsy – empty bedpan; barter parts and gadgets two milligrams later the scum dance – and i got all my money on the one with lung cramps
...
no teeth rip ‘em yesterdays; perfect weapon half mass the flagpole; Holy Trinity Triple Up
veteran, peddling free medicine; trade up at the factory outlet; machines hit the floors
could it possibly just maybe be his lessons can’t be summed up in a linear set of
pop culture references
inoperable and late frame rates?
i got all my money on the one with lung cramps
...
we don’t like it when the city lights start fading when the city lights fading then we can’t get down. ok.
we don’t like it when the city people act crooked when the city people crooked then we can’t get down. ok.
we don’t like it when the city pigeons break wings when the pigeons break wings then we cant get down. ok.
we don’t like it when the city fire starts spreading when the fire starts spreading then we can’t get down. ok.
...
who are the consumers.
what are you consuming.
why are you not filtering the poison they are spooning.
where you gonna be when the murder rate starts ballooning.
coming to your senses on some who the fuck made you king.
...
Hole in front of the shovel
Shovel in front of the brawn
Bump in the night
I’m funny w/ the catch and release
Can uh… can I get uh…
Can I get a brick…
Can I get uh… Can I get some mortar
I got to put myself back together
And uh… can I get uh… let me get a ladder for my feet to follow
And can I get uh some of them mamba
And uh, my bad can I get two…
Take what you can
Get what you must
I’m on a strict diet of bed crumbs
From now on it’s all bone and curdle
The murder weapon was a bicycle
issue fence post…twenty-sum stuffed animals…remember me
And let me get one of those cigarettes… and thirty cents
Here’s fifty…you bark a lot through my window
And can I uh… no let me get uh…
Let me get let me get let me get… some skin pigmentation
...
I combusted in written pictures and that’s why I ain’t considered a saint
Well guess what…. I ain’t
Blew my credit on some decongestant
Free vaccinations at the clinic
I’m infected with a curious nature
...
Let me get uh…
Let me get uh…an answer…
the answer comes in the form of a handwritten letter
It says this is brutally… beautifully –
absence in my briefcase
Now follow suit
The lights are out
Phones are dead
And I’m the only thing that’s running in this city
Except for the clouds and man they’re coming down
If I knew my way around I wouldn’t feel so dizzy
Seeking salvation in a booth and the phones are dead and the lights are out
And I’m the only thing living in this ghost town
Except for the clouds and man they’re coming down
If I knew my way around by now I’d be bound for home
...
Blackout on white night
I don’t speak a lick of that that language and I got a slippery memory
Let me get uh…ink poisoning…
European tailspin scrawlin’ messages on my pail skin in hopes that they get mailed in
This is my box
These are my walls
This is when time stops
You’re coming with our family recipes and us.
Let me get uh fire… I’m at the fire… where are you?
I’m at the fire… where the hell are you?
I’m blacked out
Don’t get cooked by the pilot light, I can smell metal in the air tonight.
I’ve found the library where all the dreams deferred were stored
Catalogues of cultures indexed by communal disappearance
I cannot make your past disappear
Only rabbits, only rabbits
Ignore the blood on my laces
Pools of blood are recreational
...
2 for 5
they’re going fast
the future’s bargain
that’s strange, i heard my name
the rivers parting – hurry up
things blurry up
the head bones connected to the cockpit
knee jerk ass backwards
...
THIS IS A REVISIONIST’S DRAFT OF HISTORY
THIS IS A STATE OF MIND THAT REFUTES ALL STATES BUT ITS OWN
...
your sidewalks scuff your wingtips
your angels fly through barrels…
monkeys laugh at them
...
Jewelry as a moral compass
Jewelry banged and blown through
...
Your life savings in dead men’s currency
You keep your gun in your desk drawer
Movies have taught you your hiding places
Silver screens and bare walls behind them
The illustrators of bare walls projected their dreams beyond their fears
Theirs were the walls of pyramids
Mine are the walls of crumbled towers
...
Rain soak the opiates
Not enough young in the lung
Dark dumb student – shake the plates off a manhole
Couple of spray cans and a little litter
STILL THINGS GO BUMP WHEN THEM HALOGENS POP
no mountain too high
no city too far
no coma tonight
no city tomorrow
no fire too live
no city too charged
no treaty two side
no city too large
Phantom on the picket fence how alive are you
One by one around the yard until each one felt communal pride
Dance around the table like I own the place
59 FIFTY AND I’M NEW TO THE MAP 24OZ. OF SWEAT IN THE CAP
...
One shoe in the soup-E gutter, one shoe in a velvety heaven
You can bow out without me; it may actually be safer to play with knives
There’s a Corpse full of pills and I try to sit still and build
...
NEXT TIME THINK
IN THE MEAN TIME – MINUS ONE LEFT EIGHT
NEXT TIME THINK
IN THE MEAN TIME – MINUS ONE LEFT EIGHT
This is less of a fixer upper than my last one
IN THE MEAN TIME – MINUS ONE LEFT EIGHT
Motor mouth the key to open this closure
IN THE MEAN TIME – MINUS ONE LEFT EIGHT
Dizziness is similar to whimsy with a pretty twist
Another dark night walking with thirty nine thieves and a beat
IN THE MEAN TIME – MINUS ONE LEFT EIGHT
Pretty is a bidding war for meteors and a fifty sniff
IN THE MEAN TIME – MINUS ONE LEFT EIGHT
NEXT TIME THINK
Another dark night; another not all right, this is the life and the life will not end
IN THE MEAN TIME – MINUS ONE LEFT EIGHT
NEXT TIME THINK
thirty-nine thieves quicker than forty winks
...
Bullets don’t take bribes stupid; they shoot shit…
IGNORE THE BLOOD ON MY LACES
POOLS OF BLOOD ARE RECREATIONAL
...
This is my box.
These are my walls.
This is when time stops.
You’re coming with our family recipes and us.
I don’t really know the working details of your tribes.
But I know to let ‘em loiter.
I know to let ‘em drink.
I know I’d better shoplift quicker than your shutter-speed.
Click…
...
When a live wire lights little metal rail right
Steered me clear in to the plight
Right before the bodega opened,
After the peak of night
Before the paper’s delivered
I sat on the corner and sparked a light
This is the sound of what you don’t know killing you
The same corner I perched when I zone dropped on the block first
At almost 5 o’clock watching for sun spots or store clerks
Alone spot, almost kinda like the zone was forgot
As if the grid had been reset and couldn’t catch to the clock
Or the stoop was stuck in the past a half-minute and I sat in it
With a loosie Newpy drift out of my lips, taste; half minted
This is the sound of what you don’t need still true
And I felt like a hundred bucks in the pocket of a gambling lush
Flow with a destructo luck
On the run again, the sky gleamed the maroonist coloring
Layered against the bluest tone from where the thunder lived
Here I was directly under it
Like some dejected little grey they told to stay and wait
A cotton ball in a blizzard of mischief
This is the sound of what you don’t want still in you
With a thought that rode on the bus and came for conjugal visits
Tattered territory
Stayed chattering and nagging till it demanded it
Yell it for me
And I tried to hold the thing back
But the meditation was other-ly
Reserved the right as the triggerman with the back up plan of self destruction
This is the sound of what you don’t know killing you
So how dare you assume that I’ll sleep when you’re dead
For whatever you imagine poetry and justice feels like when you combine them
This is the sound of what you don’t need still true
...
We are always outnumbered but we were never out militiad
There’s no dignity for criminals, no ministry for the wicked
...
Look – um, the other teams bringing in ringers
Look – um, Sally pulled a pistol out
Look – um, Billy got a blunderbuss
Is it enough to arrogantly pull what’s left of the rug out from under us?
This is the sound of what you don’t want still in you
...
Ya’ll need to get up – y’all need to get up
give the scooters back to the youngins.
What’s up kid – dap dap dap
Who you?
OT, let me get those glasses (fronts flash)
They prescription an will do you no good
Your eyes blue – that’s tight
Aw shit son – that is tight
Look at hers – she your daughter?
Yup – tru – I ain’t ever seen you round here
Three streets up pass the park
Look monkey (postures fade) – aw sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it – but he ain’t really taking that man to jail (just a trick as if a district 5 rider with a mope is gonna drive past no matter what).
Heaven – heaven! – turn that around and don’t go past the hydrant again
I know, they’ve been all over today – you seen all the cars right? Beige coupe, red Taurus, y’all smarter than that.
What about you little man?
He say he in eighth grade.
Really (he lean back on the vacant) you built small, seem to carry big though. Eighth grade really?
Yeah
Tell me something smart then.
Elijah, get out of the street.
Run it smart. What?
Ok, um – I know that if you lift weights a lot and get strong your dick shrink. You only have so much skin and if you get strong that extra skin has to come from somewhere.
Bump bump bump bump
Look it’s that Lexus again (profile low, grill gold plate, all leaned back) stuntin.
Daddy, red light green light again.
Green light go…
Red light stop…
Green light…
Red light…
Green light…
DASIA WINS!!!
Reprise
the trumpet calls, and yes yes yall’s; blue in the face angel, play the ledge closely
the trumpet calls, and yes yes yall’s; the empress wears a Fifty cap
it’s been all my years since my last confession; i uh…
3 times – 5 times… father…
anything else
yes father… i appropriate things
interesting
stereos, radios, amplifiers… and I have… plagiarized at close range
7 times… blank tapes
how old are you
32 –i’ve been doing this all my life… i make sounds
i’ve committed 32 burglaries; one was a church father
terrible, terrible thing to steal from stores, but from a church;
that’s god’s house
god had a flask, i can prove it
from the hill or from the pulpit
loose cannon evangelist
is there any way to give all of this stuff back?
too late, I’ve already assimilated
this is where all the dreams deferred have been stored
this is when time
stops
catalogues of cultures indexed
by communal disappearance
i cannot make your past disappear
only rabbits
you can, however
whistle your desires
I can be beguiled and repelled simultaneously by the character of my environment. There is magnetism to the visual cacophony of my city, rife with an extravagance of historic material culture. This excess of stuff confronts me, almost relentlessly. While I surely absorb the stimulation unconsciously, I also save fragments of the most personally compelling detritus for its experiential mnemonics and tactile enticement.
Perhaps we are all accumulators at heart.
The selected evidence of age, decay, residue, and profuse quantities of discards seem to echo the energy and stimulation, the problems and issues, the dynamics of a city.
This is the palette with which I corroborate the meaning and content of my work.
They may also imply larger problems – those which all humans share. We all seek safety, well-being, sustenance, and peace.
My artwork is a formulated method of acknowledging the discomforting personal and societal stories of our time – ethnicity, intolerance, impersonality, social ills, and blight.
My research is deeply engaged in the investigation of the particular places that I encounter in my daily life. This often involves the commingling of devastating realism with a buoyant spirit of hope. My works are about our landscapes. I take material and engage it in a way that makes the work rough, but managed, manipulated, made. I take the dynamic, the idea, the visceral quality of the environment and have used it as a formulated method in my work.
Borrowed, but managed, engaged. It’s high end. It’s formulated to be thought about. It’s formulated to have a message.
There is a question, a challenge and a resolution that draws forward, in a small way, a facsimile of the landscape of the made, but makes it manageable, comprehensible, and sometimes small so that you feel the sense of individual maker, manipulator, a personality out in the world, transforming it.
Reconciliations
I have found that I am not solely a studio artist. I know how to work in a studio, but it really doesn’t engage me week in week out. I realize that what I am really interested in is the tourism outside my front door.
I was a resident of Hyde Park, a North St. Louis neighborhood for two years. I was not an outsider or an insider, and I took advantage of a great privilege to talk. What I experienced in my neighborhood was evidence of a collapsed system. My work became about working with entropy – taking apart a system and working toward disorder. The sites in which I worked presented a sore spot. They were physical proof of the destructive powers of the world, and served as a concrete example of the wider context of social failure.
My work became a dialectic that fused architecture and site, living experience, and the making of jewelry objects as artifacts of an experience. This was achieved by treating material on multiple layers of scale and behavior, altering the integrity of built structures as a way to compromise and transform.
I employed photography as an intervention on my chosen sites, and used building material in a way that disengaged it from its original structure and system. There was a revealing nature in their revision. I was releasing associations about sites I dealt with. I was only able to see these things once I had taken them apart, ennobled, and resurrected them. There was an awareness that I was trying to bring about. By bringing pieces of the system and reassembling them, I was able to demonstrate that as the system breaks down, it reveals much about its impossibility. My experiences in Hyde Park have been on-going, open-ended, complex, and suggest that fate is malleable.
There is an urgency, surgical skill, and neutrality to the small works I create. The true message in my work is in the craft and what I can do with metals and material on a small scale. Yet, at this point I could not make objects without participating in these other defining activities. In a sense, I ended with my beginning, and I began to talk about how these small objects have given voice to a wider practice. The work I present here is an attempt to reconcile the evolving concentric circles employed to reveal an object.
Verse / Vs
What’s this mean?
What’s stuck on you here.
Ur car kinda dirty.
Can I wash it?
Naw kid it’s a trainwreck; hopeless.
I’ll do it right.
Let it be.
So um, you an artist right?
So, you like draw with a vision?
Or is it like you just start something and see what happens?
Or is it both?
I just ask cause I’m trying to draw a parallel.
I don’t just ask anyone for something.
That was why I asked to wash the outside of your car.
I’ll make it look good.
All I really want is a sandwich.
I used to do all sort of heavy jobs.
Like lifting things and moving them.
My arms all messed up now.
That looks rough. You damaged.
I got shot, my bone is shattered and I got pins and metal in it.
It has been four years.
You got a loosie?
Where the burglars slept.
Same place the angels wept.
Yo you got Newport!
Here take two.
Really man I’m just trying to get a sandwich or a bus ticket.
Naw.
Just a solid?
Two times two is four, and all it for my four year old.
But I’m just tryin to reincarnate myself into someone who matters.
Maybe she’s you.
Just a dollar for a moving target.
Not because it’s fly, but because I can identify.
...
it’s been all my years since my last confession
i uh…
3 times – 5 times
father
6 times
anything else
yes father – i appropriate things
interesting
stereos, radios, amplifiers
i’ve plagiarized at close range
7 times
blank tapes
how old are you
31 –i’ve been doing this all my life – i make sounds
i’ve committed 32 burglaries – one was a church father
terrible, terrible thing to steal from stores, but from a church; that’s god’s house
i stole religion right out from under my feet
god had a flask, i can prove it – placebo hand a loose cannon evangelist
and this has all been a chance to weave opposable thumbs
is there any way to give all of this stuff back?
and this has all been a chance to take my life back and escape with both hands intact
...
When the order finally organized the storming of the gate
The justice had been redefined for every whore and saint
The able bodied soldiers put their quarters up to play
How much more can the coroner’s office take
When the ordinary people leave their corner stores and cribs
The citizens of earth will put their quarters up to kiss
How much more can the coroner’s office give
?
...
When all else fails drug dealers make the music.
The trumpet calls, and yes yes yall’s; the empress wears a Fifty cap.
Blue in the face angel play the ledge closely. Divide up by fighting tribes.
Watch them waddle back and forth lighting fires.
Flat line fetish had her feathers fanned out.
Follow the breadcrumbs back to back.
Up on your porch,
I was on the ladder walking by my hinges back to the very last rafter.
Bumper cars are only funny when they bump.
Alive with a medicine of mine’s.
Pace like molasses stretch past us.
Night of frozen chills cause the sacred is made outta mud-mud.
...
What’s the right kind of behavior to qualify as someone’s savior?
No mountain too high.
No city to far.
No comma tonight.
No city tomorrow.
No fire too live.
No city too charged.
No treaty two side.
No city to guard.
...
in a world of once upon a times
where babies are born into numerical order
there are things like hip-hop and dead people
we just need to talk for two minutes
...
there’s a new style born of spare parts
an extracted product of streetwise ingenuity
this ain’t a grieving face here
just look at that building woven together from opposable thumbs
holding hands saves lives, and people in a parked car tend to disappear
plenty big enough brains give it up like the day you hatched
they fear us when they groups of us so’s we roam in packs
routes and get aways of the food, clothes, medicine recipe to the vital
...
message by pigeon
nostalgia signals like shrink-wrap-ed
answer usher rubber neck-er double check
same hand, tugging off assortment; five-finger lazy lift
bottom feeder to the meek and hungry dummy-box
flicker latchkey; binding to the wire machinery; running to ‘em social
retardation plug in the wall
– clumsy – empty bedpan; barter parts and gadgets two milligrams later the scum dance – and i got all my money on the one with lung cramps
...
no teeth rip ‘em yesterdays; perfect weapon half mass the flagpole; Holy Trinity Triple Up
veteran, peddling free medicine; trade up at the factory outlet; machines hit the floors
could it possibly just maybe be his lessons can’t be summed up in a linear set of
pop culture references
inoperable and late frame rates?
i got all my money on the one with lung cramps
...
we don’t like it when the city lights start fading when the city lights fading then we can’t get down. ok.
we don’t like it when the city people act crooked when the city people crooked then we can’t get down. ok.
we don’t like it when the city pigeons break wings when the pigeons break wings then we cant get down. ok.
we don’t like it when the city fire starts spreading when the fire starts spreading then we can’t get down. ok.
...
who are the consumers.
what are you consuming.
why are you not filtering the poison they are spooning.
where you gonna be when the murder rate starts ballooning.
coming to your senses on some who the fuck made you king.
...
Hole in front of the shovel
Shovel in front of the brawn
Bump in the night
I’m funny w/ the catch and release
Can uh… can I get uh…
Can I get a brick…
Can I get uh… Can I get some mortar
I got to put myself back together
And uh… can I get uh… let me get a ladder for my feet to follow
And can I get uh some of them mamba
And uh, my bad can I get two…
Take what you can
Get what you must
I’m on a strict diet of bed crumbs
From now on it’s all bone and curdle
The murder weapon was a bicycle
issue fence post…twenty-sum stuffed animals…remember me
And let me get one of those cigarettes… and thirty cents
Here’s fifty…you bark a lot through my window
And can I uh… no let me get uh…
Let me get let me get let me get… some skin pigmentation
...
I combusted in written pictures and that’s why I ain’t considered a saint
Well guess what…. I ain’t
Blew my credit on some decongestant
Free vaccinations at the clinic
I’m infected with a curious nature
...
Let me get uh…
Let me get uh…an answer…
the answer comes in the form of a handwritten letter
It says this is brutally… beautifully –
absence in my briefcase
Now follow suit
The lights are out
Phones are dead
And I’m the only thing that’s running in this city
Except for the clouds and man they’re coming down
If I knew my way around I wouldn’t feel so dizzy
Seeking salvation in a booth and the phones are dead and the lights are out
And I’m the only thing living in this ghost town
Except for the clouds and man they’re coming down
If I knew my way around by now I’d be bound for home
...
Blackout on white night
I don’t speak a lick of that that language and I got a slippery memory
Let me get uh…ink poisoning…
European tailspin scrawlin’ messages on my pail skin in hopes that they get mailed in
This is my box
These are my walls
This is when time stops
You’re coming with our family recipes and us.
Let me get uh fire… I’m at the fire… where are you?
I’m at the fire… where the hell are you?
I’m blacked out
Don’t get cooked by the pilot light, I can smell metal in the air tonight.
I’ve found the library where all the dreams deferred were stored
Catalogues of cultures indexed by communal disappearance
I cannot make your past disappear
Only rabbits, only rabbits
Ignore the blood on my laces
Pools of blood are recreational
...
2 for 5
they’re going fast
the future’s bargain
that’s strange, i heard my name
the rivers parting – hurry up
things blurry up
the head bones connected to the cockpit
knee jerk ass backwards
...
THIS IS A REVISIONIST’S DRAFT OF HISTORY
THIS IS A STATE OF MIND THAT REFUTES ALL STATES BUT ITS OWN
...
your sidewalks scuff your wingtips
your angels fly through barrels…
monkeys laugh at them
...
Jewelry as a moral compass
Jewelry banged and blown through
...
Your life savings in dead men’s currency
You keep your gun in your desk drawer
Movies have taught you your hiding places
Silver screens and bare walls behind them
The illustrators of bare walls projected their dreams beyond their fears
Theirs were the walls of pyramids
Mine are the walls of crumbled towers
...
Rain soak the opiates
Not enough young in the lung
Dark dumb student – shake the plates off a manhole
Couple of spray cans and a little litter
STILL THINGS GO BUMP WHEN THEM HALOGENS POP
no mountain too high
no city too far
no coma tonight
no city tomorrow
no fire too live
no city too charged
no treaty two side
no city too large
Phantom on the picket fence how alive are you
One by one around the yard until each one felt communal pride
Dance around the table like I own the place
59 FIFTY AND I’M NEW TO THE MAP 24OZ. OF SWEAT IN THE CAP
...
One shoe in the soup-E gutter, one shoe in a velvety heaven
You can bow out without me; it may actually be safer to play with knives
There’s a Corpse full of pills and I try to sit still and build
...
NEXT TIME THINK
IN THE MEAN TIME – MINUS ONE LEFT EIGHT
NEXT TIME THINK
IN THE MEAN TIME – MINUS ONE LEFT EIGHT
This is less of a fixer upper than my last one
IN THE MEAN TIME – MINUS ONE LEFT EIGHT
Motor mouth the key to open this closure
IN THE MEAN TIME – MINUS ONE LEFT EIGHT
Dizziness is similar to whimsy with a pretty twist
Another dark night walking with thirty nine thieves and a beat
IN THE MEAN TIME – MINUS ONE LEFT EIGHT
Pretty is a bidding war for meteors and a fifty sniff
IN THE MEAN TIME – MINUS ONE LEFT EIGHT
NEXT TIME THINK
Another dark night; another not all right, this is the life and the life will not end
IN THE MEAN TIME – MINUS ONE LEFT EIGHT
NEXT TIME THINK
thirty-nine thieves quicker than forty winks
...
Bullets don’t take bribes stupid; they shoot shit…
IGNORE THE BLOOD ON MY LACES
POOLS OF BLOOD ARE RECREATIONAL
...
This is my box.
These are my walls.
This is when time stops.
You’re coming with our family recipes and us.
I don’t really know the working details of your tribes.
But I know to let ‘em loiter.
I know to let ‘em drink.
I know I’d better shoplift quicker than your shutter-speed.
Click…
...
When a live wire lights little metal rail right
Steered me clear in to the plight
Right before the bodega opened,
After the peak of night
Before the paper’s delivered
I sat on the corner and sparked a light
This is the sound of what you don’t know killing you
The same corner I perched when I zone dropped on the block first
At almost 5 o’clock watching for sun spots or store clerks
Alone spot, almost kinda like the zone was forgot
As if the grid had been reset and couldn’t catch to the clock
Or the stoop was stuck in the past a half-minute and I sat in it
With a loosie Newpy drift out of my lips, taste; half minted
This is the sound of what you don’t need still true
And I felt like a hundred bucks in the pocket of a gambling lush
Flow with a destructo luck
On the run again, the sky gleamed the maroonist coloring
Layered against the bluest tone from where the thunder lived
Here I was directly under it
Like some dejected little grey they told to stay and wait
A cotton ball in a blizzard of mischief
This is the sound of what you don’t want still in you
With a thought that rode on the bus and came for conjugal visits
Tattered territory
Stayed chattering and nagging till it demanded it
Yell it for me
And I tried to hold the thing back
But the meditation was other-ly
Reserved the right as the triggerman with the back up plan of self destruction
This is the sound of what you don’t know killing you
So how dare you assume that I’ll sleep when you’re dead
For whatever you imagine poetry and justice feels like when you combine them
This is the sound of what you don’t need still true
...
We are always outnumbered but we were never out militiad
There’s no dignity for criminals, no ministry for the wicked
...
Look – um, the other teams bringing in ringers
Look – um, Sally pulled a pistol out
Look – um, Billy got a blunderbuss
Is it enough to arrogantly pull what’s left of the rug out from under us?
This is the sound of what you don’t want still in you
...
Ya’ll need to get up – y’all need to get up
give the scooters back to the youngins.
What’s up kid – dap dap dap
Who you?
OT, let me get those glasses (fronts flash)
They prescription an will do you no good
Your eyes blue – that’s tight
Aw shit son – that is tight
Look at hers – she your daughter?
Yup – tru – I ain’t ever seen you round here
Three streets up pass the park
Look monkey (postures fade) – aw sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it – but he ain’t really taking that man to jail (just a trick as if a district 5 rider with a mope is gonna drive past no matter what).
Heaven – heaven! – turn that around and don’t go past the hydrant again
I know, they’ve been all over today – you seen all the cars right? Beige coupe, red Taurus, y’all smarter than that.
What about you little man?
He say he in eighth grade.
Really (he lean back on the vacant) you built small, seem to carry big though. Eighth grade really?
Yeah
Tell me something smart then.
Elijah, get out of the street.
Run it smart. What?
Ok, um – I know that if you lift weights a lot and get strong your dick shrink. You only have so much skin and if you get strong that extra skin has to come from somewhere.
Bump bump bump bump
Look it’s that Lexus again (profile low, grill gold plate, all leaned back) stuntin.
Daddy, red light green light again.
Green light go…
Red light stop…
Green light…
Red light…
Green light…
DASIA WINS!!!
Reprise
the trumpet calls, and yes yes yall’s; blue in the face angel, play the ledge closely
the trumpet calls, and yes yes yall’s; the empress wears a Fifty cap
it’s been all my years since my last confession; i uh…
3 times – 5 times… father…
anything else
yes father… i appropriate things
interesting
stereos, radios, amplifiers… and I have… plagiarized at close range
7 times… blank tapes
how old are you
32 –i’ve been doing this all my life… i make sounds
i’ve committed 32 burglaries; one was a church father
terrible, terrible thing to steal from stores, but from a church;
that’s god’s house
god had a flask, i can prove it
from the hill or from the pulpit
loose cannon evangelist
is there any way to give all of this stuff back?
too late, I’ve already assimilated
this is where all the dreams deferred have been stored
this is when time
stops
catalogues of cultures indexed
by communal disappearance
i cannot make your past disappear
only rabbits
you can, however
whistle your desires