Becoming One with the Dusty World (1966-2002)
1.
Everyone is trying to recover the project.
What project?
Which everyone?
OK, maybe I’ve overestimated the power of music and the diminuendo of psychedelic Marxism
and the longevity of recycled sounds.
Gone, the one whose endless choruses underwrote so many of my poems,
pages that fatally depended
just as this one probably does
upon the irreplaceable,
infinitely suggestive
background vocalizations
of Mary Hansen, RIP.
2.
Surely I owe you more than one poem!
You kept me company on so many nights,
across and down so many pages.
Who cares if most of them
turned out more or less worthless
without the Stereolab tracks
that inspired them?
I even met you once.
Just after The Fearless Microbe Hunters came out,
introduced by Charles Long on a verdant Battery Park evening. You were so nice
and I was so incapable of articulating
anything remotely resembling what your voice
had meant to me.
*
The Afterlife of Pop
as old as Morrissey
Yes, some day I’ll be
as old as Morrissey
and crawl up to the mirror
with a wave of enthusiastic horror.
Boys and girls once young,
veterans of divine love and despair, everyone eventually has to say it: Yes, some day I’ll be
as old as Morrissey
and crawl up to the mirror
with a wave of enthusiastic horror, but sans thousands of diehard fans, and sans his glorious back catalogue,
hoping for the grace to be born
in a grim city (leave as early as you can!) and to age as vicariously as possible.
*
After the Slits
He is set to “self-destruct.”
Meet my messed-up friend,
my razor-thin underground hero.
As I hardly need to tell you,
he is set to “self-destruct.”
Does this bother you?
I can’t see why it should.
Doesn’t everyone have the right to his or her own fate? I know I do. Just look how I deposit my blossoming life in his pale, shaky hands
to crush, drop or pleasure as he likes.
Exhibit the exquisite corpse
or rush on to the next emulator
or the next thousand of them,
flowing into the dead zones
of a rich, feeble culture.
Sound as fleeting monument to ragged dissent
and all the elusive riffs smart poems pretend to ignore.
But not this one.
Meet my messed-up friend, my razor-thin underground hero.
As I hardly need to tell you,
he is set to “self-destruct.”
Does this bother you?
I can’t see why it should.
Doesn’t everyone have the right to his or her own fate?
I know I do.
Just look how I deposit my blossoming life
in his pale, shaky hands
to crush, drop or pleasure as he likes.
Later there will be time to redeem our pisspent youth,
get married and have a house in the country,
slip into some much more reasonable sequel,
a life barely haunted by every one of our dead 20-something friends. I remember a customer jumping on a table that night
as the local news cameras rolled
at that improvised Park Avenue South funeral
for another “only curious” boy
who liked himself less than me, than you, than tomorrow.
