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Of What I've Seen

by Roger Aplon and Marcos Fernandes

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1.
In Memoriam: Richard Avedon – October 1, 2004 In The American West 1979-1984 This is not the American West of John Wayne or Warner brothers, No! This is the Amerika of John Lynch & Count Dracul . . . of Richard Avedon: This moneyed wise-guy who’s come to snap the simple folks on the plains . . . to make an irritating image – How did he survive their rage? I guess we’ll never know for sure?! Eyes. You fix on the eyes: Black faced coal miners who stare down his lens. Their whites the only reflected light. Beads of black sweat on a furrowed face in Eagle Pass, Texas / slick & sticky blotched skin of Oklahoma Oil. White / Scaled / Gesso miners / Cody, Wyoming. These images, too reticent to speak, squint or smirk or curse / Are mute / Are mutant / Are – at war with Avedon: Accuse – Suspect – Accuse. They’ve been conned before / maybe by the best / maybe by his ‘Clarence Lippard’ drifter Sparks, Nevada, by the playful nonchalance of ‘Carl Hoefert’ card sharp, Reno, Nevada or maybe they’ve been plagued by Syphilis or Gonorrhea in Salmon, Idaho or lost their teeth in Albuquerque, New Mexico or / been scorched by radiation in Rocky Ford, CO. These men & women are not the talk of cocktails or stuffed quail in New York City – No! But, we agree, this is Avedon’s country too, Damn You! & when, like a ripe egg, these Great Plains part, the dead will carry the living into battle & on each front you’ll see their eyes first: vacant & white & running blood. Richard Avedon: Photographic Portraits – Caxia Forum: Fundacio “La Caxia”
2.
Midwestern Christmas The boy in the blue snowsuit is fat, nearsighted and snivels when the whip snaps back the snow. His hands are fans: bruised blue coral humming in the corners of his elastic mittens. He’s mumbling to himself stumbling in the slush one foot in one foot out. At the pond he stops, cackles at the ducks growing drunk in the ice. He thinks how big he will grow: Big as the tucks that haul the hogs away; Big and bland as these sloping plains murmuring to themselves their own private song. So he slides along the surface of this frozen lake taking stock – counting the years ahead, swallowing the days one after another, growing and planning his own secret home under acres of this Midwestern snow.
3.
The Woman Aaron speaks of deserts: of oases & life, of honey dates & oranges, of quicksand & hunters on horseback. The desert is like that, life in one hand, death in the other. It’s been so since the first camel, the first scorpion, the first enigmatic nomad. She also speaks of hyenas (driven mad by memories), of tanks & phosphorus bombs & burns that never heal, of missiles & mortars & vultures hunkering. Today is day eighteen of desert war, war that began forty years ago, or five thousand seven hundred sixty nine years ago. It cloaks the land of milk & honey in its quilt of blood. She speaks now of the fearful (huddled in shattered doorways) & the broken (missing eyes & arms), the demented (mumbling under blankets of bones) & of the heroic (clawing though rubble seeking the lost, the dying & the dead). Gaza Israel 1-13-2009
4.
She's Chosen 02:12
She’s Chosen She’s chosen the middle of the road to make her stand: There’s blood in her good eye & a bouquet of wilting carnations she waves like a flag above her head & chants her gibberish with a hint of longing & a tear or two & no one comes to reassure her or take her home or a cop with a badge & they honk her to one side & to the other & she bangs her flowers against their windows & curses their mothers & fathers & all their born & unborn & lifts her skirt & pisses against the door of the one that’s stopped & I see a man at the corner who watches but doesn’t move or seem to care until he comes into the light & takes her arm & holds her against him & rubs her back with his free hand & several applaud & continue on but when I turn she slaps him hard & wailing waves her broken bouquet & turns down an alley & snarls & whines & dares him to follow into the dark.
5.
“Some Kids Set Me On Fire. They Poured Kerosene On Me From a Milk Container and
Lit Me With Matches” The sky's collapsed. White mice in blown glass pack oranges sucking lethal baskets of yam. They run under the exhilaration of death feet sizzling through rivers of rain. Their nails nip the cement in a tattoo of tiny rockets. The air's liquid with lettuce and an avalanche of laughing eyes. At the end of Avenue B hovering in the roots of old hands a stink of furious fingers soundlessly gagging.
6.
The Planting And Nurturing Of The Latest Garden When the dude with the big ears and no hair kicked down the door the chandeliers jumped on their wires, cottonmouths raced under lace doilies snapping up purple hearts and disappearing in the pockets of head waiters. It was a great set, Jimmie stomped the son-of-a-bitch while I collected donations from the ladies' auxiliary filling and refilling my canteen with Chanel No. 5. Jo Ann sloshed Old Crow in the hammock crocheting bluebirds on her lavender jacket, her smile lighting up the fire-escape like a cluster of new nasturtiums.
7.
The Shades In America Are Down Summer has taken its toll & one by one couples abandon their rooms & move to the mountains or the sea or wherever families gather for the last hot nights & they sweat together under the weight of vagabonds & tramps & pick- pockets & the larvae of the street who swarm in their dreams like adolescents intent on shame & they welcome the relief of a cool bath to alter their thinking & only wish for salvation from debts & fear & for simple pleasures: a place to hide their memories of blood being spilled & the chill of the dead alone on a carpet of tears & promise to recollect forgotten promises & come home to the usual business: bury their head in the sand & lift their asses high enough to be noticed by those politicians who relish a good fucking of the willingly ignorant & uninformed. August 2003
8.
t's Mother's Day and I've been watching 900 US Cavalry disembowel Chief Black Kettle's Cheyenne women and their kids at Sand Creek, Colorado in 1864 cutting out only the mature genitals to stretch on saddle knobs in Ric Burns' documentary "The Way West". It's Mother's Day and I've come back from a late lunch with Mom after an emergency trip to a Vet who put down our dying dog. She was an old breeder who'd folded after her 2nd heart attack, three litters and 5 years on the dog show circuit. Her handler called her Jubilee and gave her up to us to nurse through her dotage. She left us behind with a rambunctious pup she reared as her own. We'll all need to adjust. Our friend Renee recently lost her dog of sixteen years. Without her, she says, the walls don't square. They'd crossed the continent together DC to Illinois to California. In Colorado, Fort Lyon, where Chivington mounted his assault, lies southeast of Pueblo where my son's mother has a sister. Arid in summer, brutal in winter, not many settled here on the way west. Not many tourists. Rooms rent cheap in southeastern Colorado Food's generally fresh. A good place to barter, shop for bowls, scavenge artifacts. A good place on a long trek to pull up get mom a coke let the kids stretch their legs and pee. A good place too for the family dog to cut loose and maybe dig for bones.
9.
Trailing The Army
 There are armies crossing Nebraska. Armies that fatten on leftover cows armies so silent and sure they lumber over the day unmindful of sweat forgetting rivers crossed and recrossed. I am trailing the army gouging huge holes in their water bags clipping the sharp eyes of their bayonets exhausting their mothers with stories of past atrocities. Someone has to follow. Someone must nip at the wide black haunch. They are well organized and have learned the rewards of cutting everything down. Everything that grows on its own is suspect. No one has survived the wave on wave of their perfect form. Even the frogs fall game. The nights are filled with their music; They mimic the chords and pipes of human throats. In Kansas City there are people already overcome. In St. Louis there are people of knowledge catching planes. In Detroit no one has even begun to care.
10.
The Part of The Gypsy Girl will be played by her twin, the one with one brown eye & one blue. She’ll carry a guitar & dress in a velvet coat. Her smile will be painted green, her frown a pale pink. When she enters the secret room there’ll be men with drawn swords & automatic pistols to guard her every move. & where she walks there’ll be corpses to name & caskets she must number & bless. & when she’s ensconced in the limousine she must not be tempted to kiss the general who sits at her right or the queen who sits on her left. & when they arrive at their inevitable stop she’ll be carried to her room where they’ll extract her eyes & replace them with the eyes of the goat who oversees war. It’s then she’ll be led to edge of the town where she’ll be left to roam our valleys & mountains & sing of all she has seen.
11.
You Sent Me To Kill Or Be Killed Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, the enigmatic figure at the center of the worst American war crime in recent memory, admitted for the first time on Wednesday deliberately killing 16 Afghan civilians last year, most of them women and children . . . Critics of America’s decade of conflict in the region . . . seized on the stresses experienced in the war by soldiers like Sergeant Bales . . . NY Times June 5, 2013 It’s Late. Night hangs heavy in Kandahar Province. Scorpions. Wood lice. A Mantis prays. Staff Sergeant Robert Bales injects his nightly dose of anabolic steroids, buckles up his gear. Four tours in ten years. No time to reminisce, no time to dream. He’s careful to climb down the ladder reserved especially for him. At the bottom is the pit, Dung Beetles scurry. His head throbs. You’ve seen your buddies’ shredded bodies baking in the desert sun, babies dangling dead from barbed wire, a woman blown to clots & bone by the bomb she’d wrapped around her waist. The medic’s say PTSD – The lawyers say, booze & drugs. Tonight, Robert dreams mayhem: Spirits of the brave & lost will cross the devil’s river – He’s locked & loaded . . . Night goggles & high octane Wild Turkey 101. My enemies are everywhere: In their tents, behind their walls, in their gardens & in their beds. They babble in tongues, sneer & wail. I need silence to think. My throat chokes on our renegade soup. There’s nothing to be done. Extermination. I am the champion of justice, the avenger & the priest. Locked & loaded. Bless me father for I . . . I am a missile unleashed & proud, a drone in desert camouflage. I’ve been sent to redeem my country’s honor. I am without home, without mercy, without guilt. Pray for me as I kneel in the sand & light my torch. Nothing is left of me. I am slag. I am heroic. I am disaster. See me for what I am, what I have been trained to be. I am a machine. Running on fumes. Nothing matters. The mission is at hand. How many must die? & why? I am marked. Absurd. Without guile. A bomb. Fused. As intended. Poison. Catastrophe. Collateral damage . . . It is. I am . . . What must be known . . . What must be expected.
12.
ónde Está Mi Madre A child weeps & her cries reverberate throughout the dingy warehouses, makeshift barracks & swarming extraction camps, it ricochets across the desolate plains of west Texas & southern California & southern Arizona & the mesas of New Mexico. A child weeps & his tears threaten to drown the tongue-tied Christians, Jews & Muslims, they dampen dinner tables in Portland, Maine & Poughkeepsie, New York & St. Louis, Missouri & across the Rockies & across the sea to Honolulu. Children weep & parents weep & a once-proud people cringes in the wake of what it has allowed & what it has wrought & what it is to be dishonored. Between bouts of fear & trembling these kids are heard to ask ¿ Dónde está mi madre? – ¿Dónde está mi padre? – ¿ Dónde estoy? ‘Where Am I?’ rings off-key like a cracked bell – like a symbolic “liberty” bell, cracked but still resonant, reminiscent of what has been lost but might still be.
13.
At The Side Of The Road he waits with torso naked for the passersby to see & touch if they dare this man yoked, with a gnarled hump & twisted frame who comes day by day to offer himself as the least of us to remind the strong of the lost, the violent of the humble, the proud of the weak & though the air is brittle & the ground is wet, he comes with cup in hand & alone as are we all who wait for our bus that will arrive soon & with it the inescapable & most perfect fact we are bound to a future we know not & will only taste once.

about

Poet Roger Aplon and musician Marcos Fernandes unveil Of What I’ve Seen, a powerful and gripping collaborative work. A collection of thirteen of Aplon’s poems set to music by Fernandes, the album - both a culmination of their decades-long partnership and a fresh new approach to their creative interplay - engages the listener with its immediacy and its myriad moods. Though living in different continents, the two have managed to create a cohesive narrative and a chronicle of their times. Aplon, a well traveled and well published poet, offers a broad historical perspective and poignant social commentary, stating that the poems “seem to speak about the country I was raised in and the culture I wrestled and still wrestle with. I think the selection serves as a reflection on the times and character that has shaped much of my writing.“ Fernandes, himself a well traveled and published multi-instrumentalist and soundartist, brings forth his catholic compositional style to sculpt a studied yet spontaneous soundtrack for each poem. With the help of a select group of players expanding his palette, Fernandes conjures up diverse backdrops from beat driven ensemble grooves to abstract improvisations to ambient soundscapes.

credits

released August 26, 2023

Roger Aplon - spoken word
Marcos Fernandes - drums, percussion, Pro-One synth, phonography, ney

with
Burnett Anderson -trumpet (9)
Yoko Arai - piano (5,13)
Hans Fjellestad - Moog (1,10)
Eric Glick Rieman - prepared Rhodes (2)
Jan Mah - guitar (10)
JasonRobinson - sax (6)
Jyoji Sawada - bass (6,9,13)

Recorded, assembled and mixed by Marcos Fernandes at West Valley. Drums recorded and mixed by Shinji Kawase at Gumbo Studio.
Mastered by Shinji Kawase at Gumbo studio, Yokohama.
Roger Aplon recorded in La Mesa. Burnett Anderson recorded by Carlos Arias at Onesimo Studio Productions, Chula Vista, California; Hans Fjellestad in West Hollywood, Eric Glick Rieman by Jeff Karsin in Taos, New Mexico, Jason Robinson in Amherst, Massachusetts, Yoko Arai s\and Jan Mah in Tokyo and Jyoji Sawada at West Valley, Yokohama.
Cover artwork and design by Kio Griffith.

© 2023 Accretions www.accretions.com

Roger Aplon www.rogeraplon.com
Marcos Fernandes www.marcosfernandes.com

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Marcos Fernandes 横浜市, Japan

A native of Yokohama, Japan, Marcos Fernandes spent over three decades in California as performer, producer and curator. He has performed in the US, Canada, Mexico, Portugal, Hong Kong and Japan as a solo singer-songwriter, improviser, phonographer and percussionist/sound artist with various ensembles, dancers, poets and visual artists. ... more

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