Come down from your ghostly perch / silver poplar and congress of birch / Solemn bird, come down // Be a man who will not be cowed / with rough hands and a rubbery mouth / When one branch of the birch must be bowed, allow one to be bent and one to be proud // I take my sip from the fissured bell / I take what hits I can, and I raise my hell / Only time will tell who is free // You take your sip from the lion’s maw / You peck at his black lip and you steal his barbed tongue / See what strange, strange harm a small bird has done // Be a man who wil not be feared / with a nest in your great russet beard / with a flush on your chest and fierce cheer / and soft flesh where a feather once reared / Oh, my dear, be near // Bear away your gifts and your body of half-baked clay / Bear away your bottles of whistling beer / I am only a slip of myself just yet / You are only a feint frontier //
I forgot I’d recorded this. Then I remembered.
dappled people - blue columbine
son, tell your feet / tell your feet not to hurry / let them be / let them season like pine and blue columbine / let them lie // son, tell your hands / tell your hands they’re too heavy / how they carry the air / as if air were a stone or a spear / let them spare me / spare me my only heart // fill your breast like a beaten hull / or take the metal off / silver, bronze, or tin, or gold / or cold, cold copper to cover what you ought not // you’ll have your turn / have no thirst but your brother’s / pass the urn and the earthenware cup / when the first’s had enough you’ll have some // but have no pride / have no pride but what’s offered / how you rise from the wine / as if wine were his shield or his shrine / how you shy from him / you shy from my only heart //
…
This is garageband, this afternoon in my bedroom. I’ve been fighting off a sinus infection the last couple of weeks, but I took some zicam and laid down the guitar track in one take, which is pretty ridiculous, because I never ever play this song anywhere near correctly. I’ve been doing a scratch track a day just as practice; maybe it’s paying off.
I started writing this back when I was still going to barefoot coffee more days than not, sitting on curbs with kids who’ll always smoke more cigarettes than I do (roughly two to four a year, bummed from Travis, very sentimentally, only when we’re not living in the same town) beating myself up about a lot of things, a lot of the time. I think I’d just started really trying to play the guitar, and I never finished any songs. But it’s been a few years. The east bay has been absurdly good to me; I’m beset everywhere by foreign talent, foreign strength, wild and beautiful things from people I’m lucky enough to know, and to hold, and to love. It’s hard to ignore what you want in this space, and it’s easy to find people who’ll kick your ass if you try.
I had to boot my laptop in 32 bit kernel mode to record this, but it’s really just a sketch, a way to spend an evening, something to remember. I finished writing it last week. That’s a couple of years, at least. It’s called Resolution 22. It wouldn’t be called anything, but I have this amazing partner in crime who keeps telling me I have to actually title my songs.
Go with old Impatiens, bursting coiled and green / With your brothers bruised like summer / Pale petals on your cheeks / Go and take your quick words with you / Teach me nothing more // Sweet, your brothers went and brought you a slow, barbed snail / But what’s that happy scent they caught you? / What in god’s name is that smell? / Iron swimming on your shins in old mosquito swells / Teach me nothing else // Your whip, and your whistle / And your history of hot needles / Can I cast them off? / Can I go? // And can I please be brave / And can I treat these comforts like pepper / like all sharper things, as a trade / I’ll raze our house and wave its dust away // Give me just a dripping plum, give me a july bath / and I will drag my tongue down every surface / and each salty back / and I will let you plunder no good ground again // Give me what I had: / my whip / my whistle / my history of hot needles / and I will cast it off / I will go //
dappled people - ashton
ashton / for once go taste your own strong salt / go touch the crowding tongues of mustard / go kiss the cormorant bones / but don’t hold me / my hands can’t offer help / go find a frame where i am not the only thing in which you see yourself // ashton / you wrap yourself up in that nice brown bag / you squint into that amber spyglass and you spot steadier land / but i see stars above the softest marshe’s mud / if you can stand there you’ll be proud / but if you can’t what passing hand will pull you up? // underneath the sacks of seed and bags of sallow hay / up comes the cattail reed / up comes the bottom of the bay / go sew your broken teeth between the rows of overwatered wheat / a mouth may grow / though the field lays fallow // ashton, what billows at your front porch now? / if that’s your white shirt on the fishing wire i will not cut it down / i won’t hold you / i cannot keep you still / the wind’s been chewing at the sun’s fat ribs and now it’s getting at you too //
…
this is months old, but it was always so tedious playing I’d stop halfway through a take. Then Owen came over and learned the guitar part and suddenly I felt energized by the thought of not having to carry a guitar on stage. This is mostly for him, for reference.
dappled people - sibley/joaquin
…
Thought I saw a stag’s head pinned high on the blue gum tree / just a broken bough, a torn teeshirt tied round the leaves / I came in all thistled with deep purple knees / I was tired to the bone // An outside cat will still come home if it’s cold / And if it won’t come back, kid / it’s just that home is wherever the light goes // So cap the bottle’s whisper and catch the water’s cough / tear this cotton dress away from me, take your coat off / moss will make a bed on the slippery rock / when you’re tired to the bone // you drink your whiskey, I will drink my thistle milk / from the bowl of that belly I know we both ought to work harder to fill // Who will climb the slope of that green mosquito hill? / who will sleep in the soft grass again? / who will swell like red, red fruit, and let the land have its kill? / when you’re tired to the bone, you will //
…
Somewhat removed, stylistically, from what I usually do, but I suppose one can only stay with the same picking pattern for so long. This is related. I have a camera again, so expect more of that, too, once I get the film developed.
I tried to count the bluejays my father shot/ their tiny wars of ceaseless noise against his pellet gun/ I was twelve; they were jumpers to be caught/ brothers of my heart/ like them i’d die before I stopped// and i had hoped i was a liar, not a fake/ that i could take this name without taking its place/ that i would be bold, bald-faced as fickle snow/ and stony roads that told you they would lead you home/ they told you they would lead you home// I am just this sullen, stateless/ just this artless thrumming/ just this howling I do in the dark// And song is nothing but a bully, says my love/ it takes your money; it’ll take all of your trust/ and wake your polaroids, and whittle down your poplar chest/ and make you a real boy, with a bruise bloomed in your bonfire ribs/ I’ve got a bruise, too; I am proof that you get used to it//
Last night I recorded something that resembled this (in the way that the fancy book you really want to buy resembles the facsimile you buy instead) but nearing the session’s terminus garageband crashed and lost all the work I’d done. I bore this with an odd sort of sleepy resignation (less and less odd and growing more familiar) and this morning I woke up and tracked most of it again. The piano was laid down between roars of the odd unmuffled harley davidson, sometimes a teenager careening around the corner, what I’m guessing is a lot of mall traffic, this close to Valley Fair and on a Sunday, to boot. Also, bites of persimmon, of the squat, hard type, not that horrible variety that fends off with raging cottonmouth anyone fool enough to bite down before it’s so ripe it’s almost rotten. The persimmon was good. The piano was ill-tuned.
Travis and i worked on this for a short while this summer, but I don’t think we ever recorded it, and I’m not sure how well my memory has served me. The picking’s all wrong, that much i know, but I’m fairly sure the chord progression’s always been this simple . It’s mostly his, with very minimal input by me, and it doesn’t really have a name. We always referred to it as ‘dead birds.’
You weren’t much/ just dust swirling in your car/ smoke on my mother’s porch/ your flippant heart// I don’t know you/ I did not count your grey hairs/ I cannot say you’ll die before you hit sixty-five/ though you’re likely to// I envy them/ your hands and the space they span/ the attention that they demand/ and do not seem to mind// But you curse and fold/ just as autumn is crawling in/ Still, what rampages eastwards, wet and slickly red/ won’t make you bold// You only shamed me into going home// I pace low lately/ in my box with its windows barred/ a big cat in a circus cart/ sleepless next door for the gallery// but do your neighbours know/ about the crowding of aborted scales/ the vanished signal in the static space of interstates/ and your loud loud voice?//
.
a few hundred layers of sloughed off callus more, and we’ll get there.
dappled people - hard work
Paul Baribeau writes the best folk-punk songs ever. I can’t use a plectrum, or even strum at all, so the pads of my fingers are whitely calloused things, like you’d expect someone hardcore to have. The illusion always spoils. I like bells, and glass beads hitting tile floors, and tiny things. I think you can maybe hear that, here.
dappled people - list of asteroids
Watch it fall: some cold space when autumn calls
We fight to stay; We stand there in wonder
Trees burn and we buckle our cheeks
we are mirrors, we’re made out of water
we curse with our hands and we cry with our feet
Watch them give: All these ties to every place we have lived
We wonder why through the middle of nowhere
the map is a big black hole
in the winter when cities are craters
we’re full of white noise. We’re feathered like snow
That’s how we walk away from the bullet points of asteroids.
The list is long; I will have to check them off one by one.
it’s an old song.
