twenty-six

D-D-D-Drastus
  m-m-mmmakes a n-new r-r-record
which is ppppresed up in the Chhheckk Republik

                    the l-l-l-l-ocal p-post offfffice
           near the p-presessssssing plannnnnt
                 intercepts the ppppppackage
        on the vvery d-d-d-day it's to llleave for Fffrance

curses
ffffoiled again

                 the lllllabel who was g-ggonna release it
                       calls Drastus to tttellll him the bbadd newss
                 there is a silence on the phone

     in wwwwhich wwe all consider
        the otherworldllly sweetness
    of these rrrrecords langguisshhinng, llost in ttime

on a ppacking t-t-table
somewhere
out east

twenty-seven

Like mutts on thirty-day holds at the pound,
we know our time is coming to an end.

Like everybody in the western world,
this year we haven't listened much to Drastus.

No disrespect intended, obviously.
We've only played one record this whole week,

And that one was for research, not for pleasure.
"Let's skip the details," as Mark Edwards said:

the economies of a younger, surer age.
I sing a song of Drastus, pale and wan,

whose presence in the long shadows aptly mirrors
such pictures as his music tries to conjure.

More aptly, maybe, than the music can.
For his next act, Drastus will cause a rabbit

To lay an egg, and everyone will gasp,
not least of all the rabbit, thus relieved.

twenty-eight

In El Paso, a man wakes up with his brain skittering
like a stuck disc drive -
it's like he's been awake for days, not seconds,
the same song on his tongue,
unable to escape

washes of guitar, mid-high distortion,
cavernous drums, etc.,
seem to originate
in the soft inner surfaces of his skull

whence they proceed
outward toward all four walls of the dark room
and drip down - whereupon our man, who was awake
the second he opened his eyes,
feels a sort of agitated peace come over him

in France, meanwhile,
Drastus has accidentally committed the whole scene to tape
and contacted the people who put his records out
and called his mother to wish her a happy birthday
all blissfully, unmercifully unaware
of the Texas connection

twenty-nine

Drastus awakens to find himself transformed
from the French man he was
to the two-and-a-half-inch high rabbit-like plastic statue
he now is

he looks around on the shelf
and admires the other Dunnys:
It from Abruptum, Sakis from Rotting Christ,
Glenn fucking Benton

it's in the looking around that he realizes
he's not condemned to sit still on the shelf
however unlike in Pixar movies
he doesn't rejoice; nor does he rally the others

instead they all stand there, nearly motionless:
one going over his probably-now-doomed plans
another bemusedly noting how tall his old self
would have been, stood next to the new one

one wearing shades
and G.B. just cursing at Jesus under his breath
all so tiny, all so darkly printed
so wholly complete in themselves

that, should no one ever visit
this house with its odd shelf of toys,
it will be sufficient
to have stood here, and to have stayed here

being occasionally dusted
as one hopes to be
once or twice
in his life

thirty

This is the thirtieth short poem about Drastus.
Like many of the other short poems about Drastus,
it is not really very short. I apologize.

The thirtieth short poem about Drastus
prefers the three-line stanza to the more traditional quatrain
because there is just something about the number three.

In the thirtieth short poem about Drastus
it is unlikely that we will determine once and for all
what makes Drastus so much better than all the others,

be they French, Norweigan, Ukranian, Swedes, or Finns.
Is it his gift for a persuasive title?
His hard-won gothic imagery, neither garish nor too subtle?

Too late to say. It was always too late to say.
We have arrived at the thirtieth poem.
There will be no thirty-first.

No book will come to enshrine the thirty short poems in print.
Like their subject, the thirty short poems about Drastus
are temporary things in a world made up of temporary things.

Even the old serpents celebrated by Drastus,
who seem so fearsome
if you really give yourself over to them,

cannot last. Because nothing can. After nature's first green passes
so do the rest of its greens.
They all grey out eventually -

immediately, even, if we take the long view.
The thirtieth short poem about Drastus
rather disingenuously prefers the long view.

When, years from now,
nobody is reading the thirtieth short poem about Drastus
because the planet has been destroyed by poisons in the air

or by nuclear holocaust,
and the computer on which the thirty short poems were written
is less than a wisp of chemical smoke in the low atmosphere,

someone will say:
"Augahthhahahgghkh,"
because he is in terrible pain.

From their place on the unreachable far side of that strangled cry
the thirty short poems will hum riffs to themselves
and protest that they are only trying to help.

Thirty short poems, your apology is insufficient.
Here I take my leave of you
and leave you to

these songs in the shadows,
at whose gates you are finally fit
to arrive.

some of the links in this piece may not be safe for work

unstick is the name of a program for the Muse# characterized in the session library as "a 'feel good' session" but the inner quotes refer to, and also generate further wrinkles within, the radically subjective possibly infinite spectrum of experience which constitutes "feeling good"

"you gotta love it" is a phrase that generates "about 202,000" hits on Google, 567,959 on Clusty, and a big fat solitary zero on Booble, whose no-results page is way funnier than any of their competitors'

but perhaps the most liberating thing you ever learn is the one you first express within seconds of your birth: you do not gotta love it

you spend your childhood and adolescence being forced to unlearn what you knew as you drew your first breath, and by the time you reach adulthood you are lying to your progeny about the whole deal, just like your whole culture lied to you about it: you just gotta love it, how can you not love it, I don't trust anybody who doesn't love [the Beatles, toast, cats, WinAmp, the Lord, Saccharine Trust, the Sybian, the theme from the Mary Tyler Moore show]: history from the middle ages onward relies in part and at times in great part on the the posited general good of good feelings

this is not a poem, it's just a series of one-sentence paragraphs eschewing two and only two rules of punctuation, to wit, that sentences must begin with a capital letter and end with a period

just so we're clear on that

the triumph of the modern period in classical music is that it allows itself at intervals to pursue feeling as an end in itself, which is the opposite of hedonism because feeling without object opens on limitless expanses of response which do not observe the usual boundaries e.g. pleasant/unpleasant/fun/not fun/etc/etc/etc, which expanses were at one point a new vista but which are ever more quickly becoming old alien territory as we distance ourselves from the modern period and reimmerse ourselves in the basic tenets of romanticism

I promise as this series continues not to be too hard on the romantics, even if they kinda deserve it

see you soon