thirteen

I'm gonna keep on loving you
'cause it's the only thing I wanna do
I don't wanna sleep
I just wanna keep on loving you

the way parents imagine their children
will feel toward them always
no matter what
they do

the desperate way husbands
expect wives
to love them
even after they don't any more

the love ascribed to Christ
who given over to state-sponsored torture
accepted his lot
and only complained once

this is how the guy from Drastus
feels about the serpent whose mighty coils
hold the earth together and will crush it
if our luck holds out

I'm gonna keep on loving you
great snake of the infinite void
I don't wanna sleep
I just wanna keep on loving you, great snake of the infinite void

fourteen

The Madison Avenue advertising man
enters the posh offices of Drastus, LLC,
in the Pont Mirabeau
on a glorious Tuesday morning.

"I just brought by some ideas,"
he says.
He always begins his presentations this way.
It's a successful formula.

He spells out his plan
to give Drastus total saturation presence
in the Parisian mediascape:
television, radio, film!

Plus billboards, crossbranding,
L'internet. All of it.
The directors ask questions
which he answers cheerfully.

The Madison Avenue advertising man
has dreamt of the Drastus account for months.
It could really open the door
to much bigger things.

He graciously accepts the coffee offered him
by the smartly dressed young secretary,
though she reeks faintly of the grave
and has drooled blood into the saucer.

fifteen

if you want to be famous
work hard
study the markets
follow your dream

if you want to be pious
pray hard
study the scriptures
follow the still, small voice

if you want to hold power
train hard
study the crowd
follow the well-trodden path

if you want to join Drastus
forget it
it's just one guy
following his instincts

if you want to come along
on his path to glory
you can't
you can just watch him go there

and hear what he has to say
as he falls through the air
or emerges from the cave
shellshocked

sixteen

Every time I misplace a one of the three Drastus records I own
I spend a whole morning trying to locate it
whether I'm in the mood to listen to it or not.
I rummage through boxes filled with CDs I haven't listened to in years.
I open closets where no-one has ever put anything even remotely musical.
There are only coats in there.
Why are you opening the closet if you are looking for the first Drastus album.
It's not going to be in there.

When I locate the missing disc
I will announce victory whether anyone is around or not.
"Aha, it was right by the fireplace!"
"So, you thought you could hide underneath an old phone bill!"
"Fuck yes! Can't get another one of these, you know!"
--since only a thousand were pressed.

Some people think of their obsessive tendencies
and feel shame, or guilt, or embarrassment.
They talk about wasted hours they won't be able to get back,
and make jokes about how they'll look back on their hobbies with regret
when they are lying on their deathbeds.
I hope that the priest who delivers my eulogy
dwells for a ridiculously long time
on how, when I'd misplaced my Drastus albums,
which tended to happen a lot because I was forgetful,
I often spent whole mornings trying to find them
and took great pleasure in having tracked them down.

Seventeen

Today I listened to death metal instead of black metal.
Death metal dudes like to call black metal dudes "fags."
What can you do.

The guitars got beefy.
The riffs got excellent.
The drummer is totally fucking sick.

Returning Incantation's Primordial Domination to its case
after a good morning's drive in its thrall,
I ran across Roars from the Old Serpent's Paradise,

the only Drastus full-length to date.
Its cover is red and black.
It beckoned:

as who, out of a world
secretly apart from both the one we all live in
and from the Ohio death metal one I'd spent the day in,

would materialize all of a sudden,
displaying its singular qualities
like a champion rooster

a champion rooster
with a hurt leg
and absolutely nothing to lose.

eighteen

The guy from Drastus
has purchased the Hubble telescope.
NASA is keeping it very hush-hush.

From his increasingly opulent office
he tilts a magnet toward the horizon,
calibrating the movements of his wrist

like a professional golfer
adjusting his putt.
2.6 billion light-years away,

in sight of galaxy cluster MS0735.6+7421,
the Hubble hears the mechanical voice
of its new father.

When, thousands of years later,
the telescope arrives screaming
at the gates of earth's atmosphere

there isn't anybody there to see it
but it doesn't really matter.
With mechanical arms, it retouches its corpsepaint

one last time
before descending
on Paris.

nineteen

I was listening to Drastus,
but I was thinking about girl groups throughout history:
the Shangri-Las, the Chiffons,
Tiger Trap, Slant 6.

On my neighbor's front lawn, hiding behind a bush,
I was listening to Drastus, trying not to look conspicuous.
I was thinking about how I can only name two women in extreme metal:
Angela Gossow, and that other one.

See what I mean?
I was digging a tunnel to China next door,
but I was thinking about the Gaia, and about Submission Hold.
Bands who might have played black metal

except that the whole scene isn't set up that way.
I didn't think Drastus
could really be held resonsible for the whole phenomenon.
But I wondered what, as an individual

making music with which to destroy sunrise,
he might think
if he ever thought
about sex and music and boys and girls in love

and how it all fits together. I was thinking about this, yes,
heaping up dirt on one side of the now-considerable hole in the lawn,
and about how sooner or later
somebody was gonna turn fink and call the cops.

twenty

always be afraid
of the small things

consider the toothache
whose physical mass

is utterly negligible:
the heat

turns inward on itself
like a self-detonating star

so too Drastus
and his friends if he has any

songs that attempt to hide themselves
in almost every way they can

open palms pushing the camera away
if there were one, which there isn't

prayers to no-one
more pious than a billion decades of the rosary

loud amplifiers in naturally soundproofed
                                                           caves

twenty-one

If you want to understand Drastus
you have to listen to old classical albums,
though not for formal reasons.
A lot of black metal guys
like to imagine connections
between their scene and the Vienna Conservatory.
Good luck.

What you want to watch for
is the low hum of the tape
that they couldn't erase in the digital transfer.
It's the evidence, as it were:
the cigarette butt left carelessly at the crime scene,
the undeleted emails on the lover's laptop.

Andre Watts, The Chopin Recital,
Etude in F Minor, Op. 10.
The roar is there throughout, though busy hands
keep trying to hold it back.

Bon Voyage, best wishes.
The silence which does not even resemble silence
rises to a fixed point and then waits patiently
for an opening.
What happens when the opening never comes

is the echo that Drastus kites
in response:
powerless and therefore dangerous,
surrendered and therefore omnipotent -

air escaping from one of the heart's valves
or all of them,
squealing
from the pressure.

twenty-two

One-man black metal bands!
The future stands before you
in flowing robes
and with a hot body. Your secrets

are yours alone! The guys in Merrimack
will never know your peculiar triumph.
Unless they start side projects.
Then, I guess, OK.

One-man metal bands!
Entire ideologies can be posited
explaining your solitude,
though it could also be the case

that you have no friends,
or that you hate your friends,
or that you like them just fine
but they wouldn't be into it.

One! Man! Black! Metal! Bands!
The future has mixed you a cosmopolitan
and wants to know if you'd like some peanuts.
As for the guy from Drastus, well,

he's got another band, too,
one with real other people,
and a mom somewhere, and probably a sister
with a cute French name,

and a day job
where they couldn't possibly guess
the totality
of his triumph.

twenty-three

this is a test

Force meets force aboard the SS Drastus
the winds blow, the bosuns bellow
hand over hand up to the crow's nest we go
of the view from here, the less said the better
chance it or head back to port

Force majeure clause in the contract means we're done for
the waves wash over the edge, the edge receives them like long-lost brothers
hand me the scabbard, I will cut cords & learn what is this ocean made
of, what will it do if provoked, what has it got left, let
chance or what you want to call it carry us all along

Force the musicians to walk the plank: use
the pressure of the market or the march of history, whatever you have on
hand but get them to marching, let us be rid
of them. See what we have left at the end of it - by
chance notice the hand reaching angrily up from the churning water,
         initial D tattooed on its knuckle

twenty-four

Once I had a live album by a band called Firehouse.
Perhaps you do not remember Firehouse.
Who does? Anyhow,

this thing showed up in the mail.
From the sound of things, the singer from Firehouse
was quite happy to be in Japan.

"Hello, Osaka!" he said to the audience.
Much of his between-song banter
worked slight variations on this theme.

In the Gnostic universe
where a just God absents himself from creation
and lets the sentient beings below have at it,

I imagine a mixup in the continuum.
Six thousand Japanese show up
for the taping of the live Drastus album.

In a severe breach of concert etiquette,
the hype music over the PA before the show
is in fact the entire Drastus catalog.

A fanfare of digital scraping heralds the arrival onstage
of our man in some sort of robe.
Cloak, maybe. You can't really tell. There's fog.

"Goodye, Osaka,"
he intones mournfully, in long syllables;
and while half the room expects him to leave,

he plays his set,
and then everyone knows
what he meant.

twenty-five

Drastus goes to the doctor about the pain in his legs.
He feels very sheepish about it.
He is only twenty-four years old.
All of his friends seem invincible.

At the doctor's office he fills out a form or two
and sits down in the waiting room.
He has brought a book with him to read while he waits.
I'm not sure what book it is.

After a brief examination
and a few questions about exericise,
the doctor tells Drastus he suspects deep vein thrombosis.
It sounds even cooler in French.

Scanning the xeroxed handouts he's been given,
Drastus learns that the most at-risk populations
are the eldery and the sedentary. He thinks
of the black metal bands who, in fine health,

tour to America or Brazil,
and he feels pride swell in his chest.
It takes a love deeper than passing fancy,
he thinks to himself,

to really walk the walk!
He considers his small pun then
and blushes
out of sight of the receptionist who's waving goodbye.