Moving Day

Boxes and boxes
line the floor and clutter consciousness;
how simple it was for the romantics

to evaporate outside this world and into

distinct harmonies in conjunction

with other worlds living in our own.

I think of bodies I have lived in;

as each box fills with different reminders

of the same persona.

To move is to live in limbo,

between here and there

Freedom knows no better set of wings,

then the incomplete and unhoused.

Somehow,

each configuration of things I have,

always on top is a delicate reminder of a lover.

The clothes is topped with silk pajamas,

from an anniversary,

Milk crates of food holds an uncooked meal,

noodles and sauce we had planned,

pens and notebooks and paper,

topped with a black and white photograph

of us dancing.

And as I eloquently two step from one home to the next,

I mistakenly live in a plot of tulips.

My flower and her reminding pedals,

always my home.

Strange Things I Heard at a Restaurant

I was always curious why the word

music,

Had its own motion in sign language.

There is a large cosmopolitan crowd surrounding me,

The middle Ohio upper class

Clogging the essential arteries of an upscale restaurant,

I look from person to person expecting some kind of likeness.

I find nothing, perhaps a familiar lack of patience.

Complaints are being tossed at the hostess

faster then orders for T bone steaks in the kitchen,

I hear that and ignore it,

wanting nothing to do with this culture.

I see a pregnant woman and her mother,

keeping close watch over an obnoxious,

overly curious

four year old, looking disgustedly around,

motioning at the waiting bench I am sitting on.

She sizes me up and determines that I am no worthy

bench mate.

No matter,

As I am seated I hear her saying something to her pregnant daughter,

about some rude people at a table making overt hand gestures at

each other.

I am trying to overhear something useful,

compelling.

As I watch the table beside mine,

A deaf man and three friends,

Their conversation is loud: hands are quickly

Speaking about their day,

Their dinners and surely how nice the weather was.

I wonder how long it took this man’s friends to learn,

the intricate art of sign language,

And I realize there is more beauty in this man’s thumb

Then the dialogue of every other table in the place.

As I watch, fascinated at how intently this quiet conversation

Fills these four friends with smiles,

That we take our language for granted.

They are practicing singing while I self-consciously pick

at a burger.

It is music to my ears

Latitude/Longitude/Attitude

I picture ripped jeans, red and black

knee patche’d punk rock kids,

shouting at cars driving by:

fuck this!

bollocks that!

anarchy!

And I laugh.

I picture my streets slithering around,

like a snake hugging the ankles

of unaware farmers digging in fields:

My streets create their own romanticism,

their own mysteries begin to unravel like

and undone scarf,

the knit wool slowly and quietly giving way

to the pull of the near spring warmth.

They wrap around

bollocks

My childhood memories, bicycle rides

and walks, getting stares from the punks,

with their skateboards.

Setting is mapped in lots of different ways:

latitude

longitude

attitude.

I wander on,

eying my brown turned hands as a Tootsie

melts into my mouth and on my fingers;

I will manipulate then to picking up stones, sticks,

toys that fell out of trees.

My streets hide me from disasters

like being lost.

I can’t imagine a world where spring doesn’t

feel like this,

where the knot of Poland, Ohio is a tangle

waiting to be sorted out,

by young boys determined to become

explorers.

Jack White: What ISN'T Your New Year's Resolution?

Dead Weather to Release New Single


HOLY. CRAP.

-Tony

Jack White: What ISN'T Your New Year

Dead Weather to Release New Single


HOLY. CRAP.

-Tony

An Open Letter

Dear Krista,

I hope that as our relationship continues and grows, we can eventually rock this hard.




Much Love
Yours,
Tony

sleeping lessons

bleary eyed and zoned,
bloodshot bound on the uneven paint on the ceiling,
she is chewing her nails until blood trickles down into her palm;
what does the reflection reveal?

perhaps answers to pensive and tentative questions

things likes,
why is she still awake?
why are her eyes red?

things that insinuate tears, pain,
after all, pools of blood never equate to pretty portraits.

the night time air settles as the molecules of the gloaming mix
and mingle
with the dust settling in her arms,
her hair completely still tickles the small of her back.

it's been down for so long, blonde,
somehow able to keep a shine despite the midnight light;

nervous,
her nightly duet slow dance charm with sleep is delayed tonight,
perhaps by the snow falling outside the window.

she needs sleeping lessons,
before she can dance. so sleep pretty pretty girl,
wash your hands and sleep.

Breathe In

Good mourning, wispy
dancers floating in my

cold winter morning breath.

Have an adventure with the clouds and the birds,
all flown south.

Hello Darling, My Sorrow's Finest Spring Season Around the Corner of Winter

hollow oak
desperate malfunctioning branches
cloak the gray winter clouds.
not really

the winter air hangs a dead still in lieu of the leaves.
that's fine, the sooner the snow coats
the dirt floor the better.

it'll be like a blanket,
knit from the condensation of angels and gods.

supervisors of this natural phenomena,
i see a wicked gray cloud,
letting a warm beam of light lay shadows

where above them dance the dead oak
in the breeze.

The Life And The World To Come

Satin is dead, or so they say;

although they say god is dead too,
Nietzsche, or so they say.

Milton says we were saved,
when adam and eve went into hell,
simply by sampling a fruit.

They buried themselves behind naked flesh,
in mountains of guilt,
scared their knees praying for rain
in the longest and driest of droughts;

their son struck the first blood,
and it was of his own blood.
One brother lay dead, melting into the cracks
of a mighty chasm,
the other was murdered.

The first guilt birthed,
From this great folly of that treacherous snake,
came an opportunity for man to prove Nietzsche wrong;

and we live now to find forgiveness,
which is reason alone.

In the life in the world to come.

You Are a Nervous Child, Paragraph

Hello, daffodil moon hanging lowly in the sky. Don't bump your chin on the table moma say elbows too you are a nervous child feet can't touch the floor and they aint stop shakin; paragraph is short three to five sentence statement of a similar train of thought playing on the floor with cabosse and engine, steam before; how can anyone acomplish these sentences in a suit and tie wed them to an idea a paragraph I can be afraid if I want.

W(ring her neck)riter is scared of I(f she cries)nstead of brave in the face of a paragraph better then theirs.

She's a Mighty Pretty Snowflake You Don't See

There are explosions
Behind my eyelids:

I can feel a winter breeze,
Descend through the canopy of pines
On the evergreen trees. They shake
The smells of Egypt and Russia,
The desers and the tundras of this world

All ride alongside each microscopic
Snowflake;

I cannot see them tonight,
But it is early for snow.
I wish to see the specks of ice,

Too warm for snow, a murky soup of mud in place.

My eyes are closed,
Watery eyed, I smile thinking about the snowy prospect
Of January.

Beatnik Prayer # 2

Snowing beaches,
nature's perfect contradiction,
but
Where are consistent
Evergreens beside highways?

Another roadside
contradiction.

Paradise Notes 2

Perhaps the best claim towards this statement that Satin is the hero of Paradise Lost can be best found in the above question. If one is to contend that Adam and Eve (as the metaphorical parents of mankind)’s fall from grace is a good thing, then who is to blame (or praise) other then the snake Satin himself. He enables an opportunity to lead a purposeful and fulfilling life of forgiveness and redemption with his temptation. Ironically failing on all fronts at disrupting God’s good creation.

Paradise Notes

In John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” there is a degree of optimism behind his recreation of Adam and Eve’s banishment, the fall man takes from grace. Although at first frighteningly cynical, this world view Milton proposes is oddly joyful: he suggests that because of this Original Sin, man’s life has a new purpose in finding forgiveness and redemption, which is indeed something worth living for.

Garden Thoughts: Fall '09

As the radish blossoms in my mouth,
its delicious bitter juices, lick my lips:

i picture

the rabbits meandering from leafy plot
to leafy plot,
digging into my carrots and chives,
sizing up the last brave daffodils
who the resident deer have spared.

My thoughts wander home,
perhaps to my parents house,
slowly surrendering itself to blankets of leaves,
or maybe I am moving forward,

To some Autumn suburb college town;
and I think of my future garden,

and as the red skin of the vegetable vanishes
I smile wider with each crunch.

On Creation

I am the cogs of a watch,
Spilled on the floor:
An introduction of hardwood to metal,
The tiny mechanism of falling,
The gravity of incomplete,
Smashes the watch and time
Stops.

Here I am:
I am the dust in the seems of a trenchcoat,
During the high noon of summer.
Winter will come in turn,
But the conception of cold burns
In mother's womb's
And there will be birth.

Creation is here,
The eloquent prose of patience,
As fragile as a ticking pocket watch.

As the dust is unshook it dances with flecks of snow,
I am married with glee,
To the idea of newborn
Art.

Friction

I am gazing at the moon,
Embarrassed in its twilight thinking of how
waves and entire oceans move and shake,
at this celestial body's every move.

Self consciously, I scratch the pale,
milky flesh on my forearm,
wondering when my hands will be warm
with your clasp,

Not my nervous friction.

Images of Landlocked Blues

This ambitious project, which I will detail later, also includes some fun pictures:

Landlocked Blues-first entry of "Essays You Need a Soundtrack To Read"

I always wondered about the romanticism hidden within the precipitation; what natural phenomenon made any kind of kiss, dialogue or action set in the rain so much more important then an overcast or even blue sky. It’s dark, that’s a plus, this would make a great opening scene for an idie film: I’m sitting on top of a cold, grey concrete picnic table out front of the Otterbein College Campus Center, it’s a little after ten, chilly. I’ve just closed up shop for the night. Scribing these very words on my laptop, my fingers dance in the same bouncy fashion as the rain striking the ground all around me, it’s starting to make more sense.
Conor Oberst’s former music act, Bright Eyes is moaning some earthy toned “Landlocked Blues,” out of the cheap standard built in speakers standard in most Apple laptops. There’s kids playing guns in the street / one points his treebranch at me / I put my hands up / say enough is enough / and he shot me dead / I found a liquid cure / for my landlocked blues / it will pass away like a slow parade / it’s leavin but I can’t tell how soon” He chirps with that Arkansas drawl that mystifies teenage heart-throbs and listeners galore; a fact proved to me as recently as this month at the Conor Oberst and the Mystic River Band show I saw earlier...but that’s not my point. Although my point does lie in the lyrics.
He’s talking about alcohol. He’s talking about drowning himself in booze and finishing off his island of woes and problems, and it’s a dark, terrifying song when a kid can see through you enough to shoot you dead in the street. He’s talking about saying, “fuck it, take me,” and letting the slow, parade like process of passing away take over. It’s scary. Anyone that knows Conor Oberst, or Bright Eye’s music knows he’s driven by his addictions: lovers, drugs, alcohol. Most of which end with a toxicity point higher then he’d like to remember. His detox, a combined efforts of Bright Eye’s final album: “Casadega,” to the transformation to the Mystic River Band, Conor’s clean, now. “Landlocked Blues,” is a gem off of the album, “I’m Wide Awake, and It’s Morning,” which was my first Bright Eyes record. Maybe that’s why this rainy setting is washing me in overwhelming waves of nostalgia.
Like I said, he’s talking about alcohol, but I’m not. I’m talking about the rain, it’s my liquid cure. I’ve been sitting in a four walled office all day, hell, I could use some intangibles. I can see how perfect each droplet is: they know nothing of the ground, they’ve got no sense of our world. Rain is a social motion, as if one were to say to the other, “It’s all down from here,” but what is here anyways? Rain gets put down only to ascend back up; the perfect life cycle, right before my very imperfect eyes. They even hit the ground with grace, it’s not like an acorn falling, with a loud and fatal crack against pavement, or a body with that sickening thud followed most likely by some prepubescent cry for help. It’s just a patter, a relevant tapping that if synced up enough, sounds like a music box that’s four years out of tune. The tempo is universally consistent; I mean, the whole bunch might speed or or slow down, but that bad snare drum isn’t any more off then the rest of the orchestra so to speak.
It’s dark too. There are two light poles in front of me, not even on the street which I think would ruin this scene. One taller then the other, it’s almost like a bright yellow earth and moon, fogged by the rain burning off steam from the hot glass bulbs. It’s literally transfixing to stare into, overwhelming to contrast the ring of rainbow forming within the streaking pattern of downward falling sheets of rain, to the blackness around. After all, it is ten thirty in the middle of Ohio; no summer could last this late without superseding into night. There are two rows of trees, forming a walk way up to the front doors that are off to my right, so the effect is lost on me. Instead, I’m treated to a more scenic view: there is a patch of trees right in front of me, and through the wet mess of branches I can see the other row, and through that I can make out another lamp on the other side. That one’s a little eerie; vague almost. The outline of leaves is almost more definite then the lightbulb itself.
I shift my weight, growing slightly uncomfortable from sitting for almost a half hour of observation; the heavy table booms as it’s legs compensate for an inequality in the length of legs. It sounds like thunder but I’m wrong. I still wish it was. The thunder could be the simple country beat going alongside “Landlocked Blues,” and like that I snap back to my purpose of watching the scene in front of me play out: something in the marriage of this song and this rain is bothering me.
I look out into the street, almost nervous to find kids armed to the teeth with twigs, but there’s nothing but a small flowing creek of rain water making its way down Home Street. I take a moment to wonder if it’s flowing with the same amount of meandering fervor up by where I live, and how long it will take me to get home. The more I look at this makeshift ravine, the more the metaphor falls into place: here passes my slow parade. How long it will take to pass is reliant on how long the unstable Ohio weather wants to keep raining, which, could be any amount of time. I could use a cleanse anyway.

.
I’m going to put on Arcade Fire’s “Keep the Car Running” and go dance in the street.
.
Okay, so I played it twice, it wasn’t long enough to accomplish what I wanted too.
.
Yes it did, it was fucking magical.
.

I’m exhausted, part because it’s been a long day part because I really went for it out there. I’m breathing heavy, but it’s okay. It’s not the scary kind where there’s no chance for survival: hot air goes out, hot air comes in, the hopeless power struggle of breathlessness. It just feels nice, like every exhale is secretly an accomplished sigh, each breath in a cool comfort from the rainy air. It’s almost a blessing to be out here right now; I’m glad I’m sitting again.
I really do feel cleaner though, cleansed, pure. My liquid cure has proved itself to be a solid prescription. I also was able to identify my aliment. I’ve been suffering loneliness. It’s hard enough to identify yourself as half a person made complete in a relationship; imagine severing those bonds. And I mean, who hasn’t missed someone or something before, but it’s been getting harder and harder the closer I come to being reunited with my partner. I begin to wonder, to think terrifying thoughts:
Will I be less the person she remembers me as?
Will she have found someone better then me?
Will she realize how she could do better?
Will I have forgotten how to kiss her on the neck the way I know she loves?
And it begins to hurt, it makes sleeping hard, it makes staying awake a chore, it adds complication to something as simple as clear skies.
And then it all snaps into place in my head. Somewhere underneath the mat of damp hair the cogs of my imagination are turning and I’m not overanalyzing a perfect relationship towards troubled seas and dramatic icebergs surely big enough to sick our ocean-liner hearts steadfast on making port on time or early. I can even ignore the poppy Phantom Planet’s lo-fi “Lonely Day,” which reminds me every morning “I can tell from the minute I woke up it’s gonna be a lonely / lonely day / rise and shine rub the sleep out of my eyes and tell myself I can go back to bed.” As if I needed another reminder, but I can face facts: she’s gone, for a long time, and she’s pretty far away, and I can’t really cross state lines easily. Or make it to New England.
But this rain, this on and off rain. It’s as inconsistent as lines on an equalizer when I play music too loudly, something about it is having no problems washing my troubles away. I listen a little bit closer to Phantom Planet, “Even though the sun is shining down on me and I should feel about as happy as can be / I just got here and I already want to leave” and I realize, freaking Phantom Planet gets it, why can’t I?
That romance under a full sun and blue skies bullshit has never been my thing. We kiss in the dark, lying in the grass, under the moon, in the rain. And I am satisfied with my liquid cure.
I turn around in my mind, completely cleansed with an after sense of euphoria as the rain, not only for the purposes of this essay but also luring me out of cover and into the street. My toes are still wet, but my almost-dry shoulders are collecting warmth from the lamps. The poles are like their own black and plastic Atlases, bearing worlds of illumination above them. I see nothing but light in these worlds: moments of joy, sadness, loneliness.
“Put ‘em up! Reach for the stars! One move and I’ll blast you dead!”
There is an army of children surrounding me; armed like a mob of insurgents with sticks, branches, trees they’ve pulled out of the moist earth and all aimed directly at me. Shit, I think, this is my moment, do or die or these kids are going to see right through me and pop me once in the heart and once in the head. I am struck with a moral decision: I can show weakness like poor ballad crooning Conor Oberst, find refuge in the bottle and let this children’s gun game overpower me; or I can rationalize, give definition to my attackers.
I turn the tables, satirize and critique the very creation of my mind that is attacking me. Each acorn and branch that strikes me is my own poking sense of longing. Loneliness is the forest that has taken root and seed in my heart and spread around my whole condition. I analyze in the silence and comfort of friends’ company days after the events of the rain, and the dance, and the songs that generate some kind of dramatic thought process thinking me down my way into the jungle of absence; I realize.
The rain is something beautiful, as pretty as a scene of reunion that I will undoubtedly see in a few days. It is my liquid cure, my detox from the unavoidable armies of loneliness that has been assaulting my heart. No amount of comforting sunshine can was that away like the rain can. I walk confidently to the beat of the slow parade, be it the racing pools of hopeful water dreaming of conception with fertile grass, or the busy rush of catching a Connecticut-bound airplane in the early morning in Columbus.
My Landlocked Blues are simple and obvious, I miss my partner. Something every couple should suffer but never for too long. I’ve done a fairly effective job in realizing this that I should avoid the whole, ‘distance makes the heart grow fonder,’ bullshit. But it’s true, it’s like the question Shakespeare poses with Romeo and Juliet, ‘is it better to have loved and lost then to have never loved at all?’
I have both, loved and lost, and never loved at all. I am content with this absence in the long term consideration of a lifetime. Fonder? Absolutely, but I feel like any good couple shouldn’t have to endure some agonizing trial like this to determine their fidelity and commitment to each other.
I dream of an ocean, a visualization to help the metaphor this song generates going. I am on a small island, but unlike the tropic paradise the mind would usually see, it is a city block, cold, rainy, Chicago by the factory row in the winter; and just that. The rest is a tempest f rising waters. It begins to rain and I am worried about drowning in my isolation; then I realize and accept that it is just my love, as she saturates me and cleanses my sadness away. The city block becomes more opportune, Broadway not Cannery Row and I realize I am at him with her in this perciptation. The globes are glowing, those noble Atlases’ holding the weight of light to keep the darkness from negating my sudden happy thoughts. I am missing her but, she isn’t gone. Poor Conor Oberst had a different opinion on the matter: his solution was not patience, silence, loneliness, his was an alcoholic binge. But that’s not my story to tell, it is a drama that belongs to him.
So listen to his “Landlocked Blues,” once you’ve finished mine.