1. |
Intro
01:45
|
|
||
2. |
||||
Some day, when I have made millions
of dollars from my poetry
(so any day soon now),
I'll buy a condo,
in a building named "Artyst,"
or "Kreativ," or "The Original" -
something with a suitably bohemian veneer.
Then, because everyone needs
a hobby, I'll take up property development
in my spare time.
|
||||
3. |
||||
i love this song!
it bubbles under my nipples,
pastes lips to my sternum,
sets sparrows zipping in one ear and
out the other, melts birdcages
and glues feathers to my arms
when i hear this song
i perform an arbutus striptease
peeling back my layers to reveal green
skin emerging from heartwood -
a dancer, composed of sticky marrow
and new breath
when i hear this song
i fuck myself
and spin the orgasmic orbit of empty space -
empty space transforms my voicebox into a vacuum
absorbing the warbling
out of every corner of the universe -
this song.
not “this song,” but
This Song
the song that mismatches your socks
on awkward sundays, or whatever day
you think is full of holes, and teaches your feet
unexpected dance steps
the song that sucks earlobes,
gives armhair a hard-on,
seduces dignity and makes the dawn
blush -
that makes you shape-shifting puzzle-piece,
makes you rattle bones until they stick
against skin,
let it go see if it comes back again
this song lures you into gardens,
baptises you with original skin,
feeds you knowing fruit,
licks the sap from your lips with a rough tongue,
and when this song licks you it feels
like needles fitting a groove
like playgrounds where children still hurt themselves
like pit bulls on laughing gas:
your chin bobs its head.
your pinky toe discovers a sense of purpose.
your right brain brews thunder
your left brain weeps uncontrollably
your vital organs flower
into an orchard.
everywhere inside you, pollinators drink
hard cider and buzz
a choral version of sexual healing
this song is not your sex life.
it might make your crotch feel
really good.
and move around a little.
like a concussion
this song might remind you
that you are skin and bone and blood,
blood cum and sweat,
sweat salt and passing wind
it might spin you a vision
of lightning firing clay
sparking song out of silence,
of a flightless buzzard
with trees for hands
and amphibious feet,
when i hear this song
i hear last breath’s first kiss
and the mud between my grass stains
i hear my heart beat
taste my iron
smell what i musk
feel my primate
i see why bonobos would laugh
at the question of clothes, then gesture
fig-stuffed mouths, lice-plucking fingers,
the tickle touch and murmur
that binds blood
and it reminds me of the way we stood around
the side of the house party
passing fire mouth to mouth
when i heard her voice exclaiming
i love figs!
they’re like ripe testacles
that explode in your mouth!
saw her feed a smile to anyone
with eyes, and couldn’t
get the taste of figs out of my ears
I think bonobos how our smiles sat together
out on the walkway, soaked through
from lost hours of chattering downpour,
protesting the bodies huddling on the porch
and their offers of jackets
and dry skin under shelter
grooming, breaking boundaries
and erasing time
with the slightest touch
head scratch
belly pinch
hand brush
a glance shared
with a treeful of others
or stolen
wondering if primates have such beautiful eyes
the better to become lost within
the way some hours passed
squeezing words around the figs
stuffed in our cheeks,
letting the rain stroke our faces,
making fingers in our eyes
to run through one another’s fur
the way some hours passed, or something
happened, as chilled skin tangled with blankets
on a hardwood floor, and we fed pieces of fruit
back and forth between our tongues
and eyes -
and all from the slightest touch
before there were words,
a glance, in the rain, as smiles danced
in the mud, figs ripened
in our eyes, branches trembled with chatter
and bore witness
in moments like that
i feel we are all composers
sight-reading eternity
all basslines and beats
and scattered verses interweaving
we are notes flying off the page
flowing one to another
sliding and breaking
suggesting and surprising
fumbling and fucking
and i would go so far as to say
we are all love songs
but not love
not LOVE
not a candy cane soap opera
or a sweet and sour sugar glaze,
not a shot of butterscotch,
or a toffee pudding after story,
nor a cheese-dip yoga pose,
a cocoa buffet,
a meat strip slather party.
no, love like a sweat stain.
like a drunk rabbit dodging cats.
like a pickpocket handshake,
a jalapeno slaughterhouse,
a blood-stained high heel.
love like a barbed wire massage
and nothing but sore muscles,
a cook-fire
a four-pronged tuning fork
bent out of shape
a ravishing wildebeest
an atomic bomb
whispering the only word it knows
love the way we didn’t speak for two hours
only looked at one another
after i handed her a note reading
if eyes were lips
when ours met there was a furious make-out session
love the way my youngest cousin pauses in my arms
resting in bass notes
as i hum northwest passage
and bounce him to the rhythm
love the way i made a pact with friends
that whosoever of us dies like an idiot
the others must piss on his grave
love the way my mom used to tell me
we’re family - and you LOVE your family
love that longs to be a memory
and a shoehorn
that slides my feet into your shoes
or yours into mine
out of such love
i have taken to building
my niece a bookshelf
and i’m really excited about this project
so i’d like to tell you how
i’m building the first shelf out of a memory
of nights her grandpa sat on my bed
and we read aloud to one another
from a book called
kevin o’connor and the light brigade
a beautiful red hardcover,
with skeletons charging on horseback
under a navy blue sky
on the jacket.
there’s already books on this shelf,
red fish blue fish, and hop on pop,
and a book of paintings, and few words
telling the life cycle of salmon
the second shelf, i’ll build from pocket-sized poetry
books her grandma kept on the bedside table.
here there will be sonnets, and haiku
that aren’t too revolting,
every living thing and whatever stories of myth-time
call her attention,
she might sit on my knee
as i sat on her great-grandpa’s
and hear the music of speaking
when the words call forth her voice.
the third shelf i’ll make from the masking tape
holding together my first copy of lord of the rings
and here she’ll find her way with a golden compass,
riding sandworms with beowulf and odysseus,
or she might travel to the moon
in the shell of a giant snail
and learn the language of trees
or she might dive into a pool
find herself in another world
where all that moves has words.
the fourth shelf i’m making from the bindings of old
journals, so here she’ll learn about free enterprise
and ceremony, bad teenaged poetry and ravensong
rising into thin air -
everywhere being is dancing on this shelf,
the book thief goes trainspotting
and finds the kiss of the fur queen
where some birds walk for the hell of it
and orange is not the only fruit of american gods.
by the time she's tall enough to reach this shelf,
she’ll be old enough
to do as she likes with the books.
old enough that when she asks me why
the last book on the last shelf is
oh the places you’ll go
i’ll tell her
‘cause that shit’s fuckin timeless.
inside its cover, she might find a note
reminding her to see a bookshelf as a garden-bed for stories,
to learn the greasy fingerprints, the watermarks,
the dog-eared pages,
the rips, the tears, the notes in the margins,
the musty scent of aging paper, the missing bindings,
the broken bindings, the bindings that open to hands
like the hearts of old friends,
to learn the books made for generations of fingers,
explaining that i built a bookshelf
out of a memory and a dream
that someday i might hand down
a red hardcover under a navy blue sky
with the words
take this book into your hands
and know you are holding your grandfather’s
|
||||
4. |
||||
out of such love
i have taken to building
my niece a bookshelf
and i’m really excited about this project
so i’d like to tell you how
i’m building the first shelf out of a memory
of nights her grandpa sat on my bed
and we read aloud to one another
from a book called
kevin o’connor and the light brigade
a beautiful red hardcover,
with skeletons charging on horseback
under a navy blue sky
on the jacket.
there’s already books on this shelf,
red fish blue fish, and hop on pop,
and a book of paintings, and few words
telling the life cycle of salmon
the second shelf, i’ll build from pocket-sized poetry
books her grandma kept on the bedside table.
here there will be sonnets, and haiku
that aren’t too revolting,
every living thing and whatever stories of myth-time
call her attention,
she might sit on my knee
as i sat on her great-grandpa’s
and hear the music of speaking
when the words call forth her voice.
the third shelf i’ll make from the masking tape
holding together my first copy of lord of the rings
and here she’ll find her way with a golden compass,
riding sandworms with beowulf and odysseus,
or she might travel to the moon
in the shell of a giant snail
and learn the language of trees
or she might dive into a pool
find herself in another world
where all that moves has words.
the fourth shelf i’m making from the bindings of old
journals, so here she’ll learn about free enterprise
and ceremony, bad teenaged poetry and ravensong
rising into thin air -
everywhere being is dancing on this shelf,
the book thief goes trainspotting
and finds the kiss of the fur queen
where some birds walk for the hell of it
and orange is not the only fruit of american gods.
by the time she's tall enough to reach this shelf,
she’ll be old enough
to do as she likes with the books.
old enough that when she asks me why
the last book on the last shelf is
oh the places you’ll go
i’ll tell her
‘cause that shit’s fuckin timeless.
inside its cover, she might find a note
reminding her to see a bookshelf as a garden-bed for stories,
to learn the greasy fingerprints, the watermarks,
the dog-eared pages,
the rips, the tears, the notes in the margins,
the musty scent of aging paper, the missing bindings,
the broken bindings, the bindings that open to hands
like the hearts of old friends,
to learn the books made for generations of fingers,
explaining that i built a bookshelf
out of a memory and a dream
that someday i might hand down
a red hardcover under a navy blue sky
with the words
take this book into your hands
and know you are holding your grandfather’s
and i do this for my niece as i would were she my own daughter
for though i long to be a father
i can say if i’ll ever have children of my own
though i have friends who say it’s a cruel thing
to bring children into this world, given the state of things
and i can’t say that they’re wrong.
after all, i see this world
the grass never as green as billboards advertise
under a sky made purple and orange
from all our gas-light, while radio activity
blankets every silence, as our daily bread soaks
in pinstripe and machine grease
still i can’t help but long to see a child of my own blood
discover this same world with eyes and ears
and lips, guts and fingertips,
discover humour and sorrow and rage,
stench and tension and shattered glass
and all this song washing over them
so i tell these friends
i don’t feel have much say in the matter.
i’m just another bastard of chance
caught halfway between muscle and memory,
a child of paradox and strange turns,
an incoherent mumble in a megaphone mouth
so i am torn between creating a pulse and being repulsed
and even as i long to whirl with another body
in the act of long division, i want to say, ‘fuckitall’ and run
to the hills where i might breathe,
and forget this all exists.
and in spite of all the terrible things
that might be the motivation,
this desire to run is strongest when i hear other people
from my generation, speaking so seriously
about their interlocking posts on facebook.
then, i wish to become an ascetic.
i wish to climb a mountain, find a cave,
lie on my back day after day, meditate,
and ask,
God? or
Mother? or
Universe?
is this really your plan?
and people will climb my mountain
so i will rush my cave to greet them
clad only in rags and a ragged beard
and they will probably ask me
do you have wifi?
and i will masturbate furiously into the palm
of my hand, raise it on high, and say
yes
here is my network
it is unsecured
then, as semen trickles down my wrist,
i will rotate my ass towards them
spreading my cheeks with my clean hand
(lest i get internet in my outlet)
and, pointing to my anus, i will tell them
you may plug in here
if you need to recharge your batteries
in this way, i will keep others away from my mountain
out of my little hotspot of cold, hard reality
but when the tsunami of cancer and heavy metals
and electric rapture washes over these hills,
when the motherboards suffer a meltdown
and the power plants have all withered
then they will return to me
desperate for my internet
and they will call me a public location -
i will pop up a warning that reads
i am but an extension cord
electrifying the navel of fleshliness
just a meat popsicle, cooking inside out -
do not call me your touchscreen:
i have no apps that will aid in your survival,
there are none that guarantee mine.
and let’s be real: the only way i could survive
alone in the wild all this time is if i wrote it
into a poem so i might have an excuse
to say to my fellow humans
your network is the key to your survival,
but your network is a resource
that these bodies produce.
your best chance of surviving comes
from the reproduction of lines
spoken many times before, being remixed
for a new generations of users.
|
||||
5. |
Weird (Wyrd)
07:38
|
|||
and yeah: that’d be a pretty weird thing to do -
but then all my life i’ve been called a weirdo,
and after all, like all mammals, like you,
i am just a dancing salt-flat
that shits mineral deposits and bleeds
oceanic, and as if that weren’t weird enough
i’m one who loves to hide in dark corners,
and yet lives for the spotlight.
though among the weirdest
of the many weird things about me
is probably that i took the time to study
the anglo-saxon language, better known as old english,
from which study i learned that weird means fate, or destiny
more specifically, “death fate,”
as in a person’s weird is their fatal destination
not just the oddities and boddities
of which they are made
i saw this clearly one drunk night
when my friend asked
what is kryptonite to superman?
and though i don’t know much,
i gamely answered
his weakness?
his achilles heel?
his flaw?
but each time he answered nope,
nope, we’ve had that already,
it’s not that
until finally it hit me
and whether he agreed or not
i asserted
it’s his weird!
surely kryptonite is fated
to be involved in superman’s death,
but the fact that he’s an interstellar humanoid
who can only be hurt by kryptonite
makes him pretty weird.
and i know, the idea that we are captive
to fate and divine trickery
isn’t so popular these days,
so i suppose i should explain
that my concept of free will is a train
running uphill towards a split in the tracks
repeating to itself
i think i choose! i think i choose!
i think i choose! i think i choose!
and that i believe life is a death sentence
as in, by coming into this world
i am going out of this world
so in the meantime, i’m just here.
and if that seems limiting to your potential
i might tell you how wings are a limitation
that allow birds to fly,
like this body has limitations
that allow me to dance
the way my blood murmurs that i can’t bypass
this medical inheritance from my forefathers
yet i take heart from their morbid humour
the way my grandma’s storytelling
moves my mouth, and teaches my words
to be host and kitchen and cook-fire,
the way i was raised on poetry
so i learned to speak from poetry
and can do little else besides
and i would still tell you that we are
a marvelously complex biological phenomena
puddles of dust become microverse
but i would say that
in spite of this inborn sense of agency
things will be as they will be
and we are as we are,
and what i am,
as far as my limited self-awareness allows me to say
is a shy exhibitionist with an itchy brain
and the words
love is alive! and its asshole tastes delicious!
tattooed on my smile -
just another weirdo preaching
a gospel of strangers
maybe that’s why i invite missionaries
to speak with me, like the young highwayman
of christ who ambushed me, while i was puffing
in the grass, outside a skytrain station.
i bore him no ill will, but i have to say
the look on that mormon boy’s face
when i was finished with him was priceless.
in response to my telling him
i couldn’t care less what happens
after i die, that i am alive
and happy to devote my energy to the struggle
of living and living well while i do it,
he launched into his bit about the cost of admission
to paradise being accepting jesus as my lord
and savouring the way those words tasted
on his tongue he was shocked
when i interrupted him to say
i don’t rightly know
that i believe death exists.
with that, i began walking away
while this young missionary
like some slack-jawed disciple
followed at my heels
you mean you don’t believe we die?
i reassured him that we die
that our bodies cease to exist
but for a moment, i was tempted to see
if i might convert him to the view
that we are an unending cascade of echoes
and glances, passing clouds turned mountains
and ever-present sky -
that when the body is gone, the breath remains.
i could have told that boy about my grandpa,
how the old man still lives
in my voice when i hum solutions
to my problems with his plodding barione in my throat,
or my knees when they foreshadow
the feeling of his cane in my hand
or my arms when they long to wrap my family
in a
great, big bear hug
i could have told that boy about a friend and fellow poet,
how sometimes i feel his breath
slip into my body, pass through my lips
faster than they can give it shape,
transforming my words into lightning
striking quick and articulate
or how his words still straighten my spine
or how my ribs still grow sore from his punching
as i remember how he would tell me
you have to be tougher, johnny!
and laugh and laugh and laugh
or how i continue to hear him speak
on the tongues of those his voice lifted -
and yes, when his body was gone
i still puddled in grief and senseless alcohol
and felt like a lost child
and yes, when he died
many voices loosed a heart-rent howl,
many hands forgot how to work,
many words transformed
into incoherent moans of agony,
i kept hearing people say it was a tragedy
but i could only think
let us die in foolish accidents.
this has always been our way.
and his echoes still rumble in the ground,
cracking voices and bursting dams,
and i am shaken with tears and laughter
for the body is gone, but the breath remains
but i might have told that boy about the wyrd sisters
who only make their cuts
so all these yarns
might be woven into a larger fabric
where we will live together again,
as two words in a sentence,
bonded molecules in exhalation,
a subconscious gesture
i might have added that the word yarn
derives from a root that means
guts, intestines
those chords on which our body plays
when it plugs in and goes electric,
so then i might have asked him to listen
to the music vibrating on those twisted strings inside him,
and explained that we are sound shaped out of silence,
nothing more than music of the cosmos,
resonating waves washing one over the other,
and that every wave breaks,
then washes back into the sea
giving rise to new swells
just as the body goes, the breath remains
finally, i might have told that boy
that i am happily on my way to whatever
weird place i’m going, and that if i have any thought
of an after-life, it is a dream
that i will become a story, and a compost heap,
a glimmer in the eye, and a curling lip,
a pool of laughter collecting in the lungs of people
who never knew me,
and a drop of water in the eyes of those who did,
that i will become a signpost reading
Love Your Weird!
pointing in whichever direction you are traveling,
and that i will leave behind me such things as
a smell of aged paper,
a sound of dirty laughter,
a touch of rain and wet hair,
a taste of figs,
an echo
rumbling in the ears of those i leave behind
that sounds like a smile, saying
This!
This!
This!
because this song
is The Song
that never ends
really,
it sounds like nothing at all,
and everything all at once.
|
Johnny MacRae Vancouver, British Columbia
Johnny MacRae is a mouthy poet who has been described as "a fnckin' effortless weirdo," "one of the weirdest poets in Canada," and "a scraggly bear riding a circus bike." He enjoys long walks in the rain, a good pile of fruit, and mixing emotions.
Streaming and Download help
If you like Johnny MacRae, you may also like:
Bandcamp Daily your guide to the world of Bandcamp