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
02:23
|
|||
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
02:35
|
|||
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
01:26
|
|||
“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 & Nurturing
02:32
|
|||
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
02:25
|
|||
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. |
It's Mother's Day
02:45
|
|||
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
01:57
|
|||
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. |
Donde Esta Mi Madre
02:47
|
|||
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
02:54
|
|||
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.
|
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
Streaming and Download help
Marcos Fernandes recommends:
If you like Of What I've Seen, you may also like:
Bandcamp Daily your guide to the world of Bandcamp