Stripped it clean of metaphor
the relative scarcity of moon
I was just talking about The Rat by The Walkmen with an old friend and I said man I was devastated by that song when it came out when I was... 27. But then I just kept going out and knowing everyone I saw for another 15 years.
It's true now though. It finally caught up to my ass. What a song. Boomeranging around like that when I least expected it.
Speaking of music the next Hell World top 5 Songs thing is going to be... Oasis. You're welcome or I'm sorry. That is just how it's going to be. If you're a writer or musician of some modest renown and would like to chip in let me know.
Also next week for paid subscribers we'll have a piece on the career of Gillian Welch and her new album.
If you missed it I can't recommend this piece from earlier in the week by Carmen Aiken enough. It's about protesting the DNC in Chicago, working at Trader Joe's during peak Covid, living in Minneapolis in the summer of 2020, January 6th, and what saving democracy is supposed to mean.
Sometimes I envision an enormous rug. A quilt. Some kind of massively woven textile. Bigger than the city. But there are also giant pincer machine arms striking at it to pull it to shreds. Stationed along other parts of the tapestry people with hanks of yarn or rag do their best with their own hasty stitching to put it back together. Destruction and creation at once.
It could not be a better day for it, we agreed, when we met off to the side of the march near the labor contingent and their banners. The sense of bewilderment was apparent in all the small talk we made. We did not understand. Maybe I wanted to feel something about the DNC. There was so much noise emanating from all of it. The DJs and musicians and celebrities and powerful people. It wanted meaning. I wanted meaning from it.
As I've mentioned I'm busy at work on a second book of short stories and poems or whatever it is that I do tentatively titled We're All Fucking Dead. A few of you have been kind enough to give it a read. Thanks in particular to Andrew Sanders for his thoughtful notes. If you're an agent or publisher and you want to take a look at it hit me up thank you.
Today a new poem free for all to read then three more short pieces of fiction down below for paid subscribers.
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Moon blindness
They were shooting poems into space. Tucking them into cozy little capsules inside of the rockets. This latest batch was supposed to head toward Jupiter’s moon Europa and then Saturn’s Titan they said.
Perhaps it was inevitable that our poets would at last grow tired of our own antiquated moon. They had long since stripped it clean of metaphor. Like the copper wiring of a derelict row house.
You see what I mean? Nothing left in the tank there.
Can you imagine what poetry must be like on one of those science fiction planets where they have multiple moons? Or some kind of distinctive moon with more personality than ours. I can’t think of any space films where they focus on all that much poetry going on though. Everyone usually too busy shooting lasers and running from dinosaurs. But maybe they just never get around to showing us that quiet pocket of space life. Maybe there is always poetry being scribbled in the tidal waves of diamond sand and on the shores of acidic oceans and under purple carnivorous canopies and floating rock formations just off camera in every single world any of us has ever envisioned.
Then again it’s possible more moons is actually worse from a poet’s perspective. You have to allow for that. Stasis amidst abundance of choice. Could be that the relative scarcity of moon for us is what animates the soul down here so to speak.
No one made it clear why they were doing this stunt in the first place. In the hopes that someone somewhere might find them much later on when we're all gone and get a glimpse into what our most educated alcoholics were so morose about all the time?
What we thought birds were secretly up to. All of the different names for trees we had come up with. How a cigarette burns like something else. The shadows of divorce. Whether war was good or not.
Either way it all seemed like a lot of trouble to go to for poems that no one was ever going to read. Not in a thousand years. You could have just published them the old fashioned way down here in a book.
Ok here are your songs of the day. Paid readers stick around for a bit more.
A god of smoke
I don’t think it will ever pass
The five of us spread out a blanket on the grass and watched a band play Doobie Brothers covers in a park by the shore. Later I had my first swim in the ocean which was pretty late in the season for me. I walked out into the water with my friend’s daughter who is maybe six. I don’t know how to tell how old kids around that age are. She reached out for my hand and I took it gently and it broke my heart. I didn’t even know we were close like that. I kept looking back to land like is this ok? Am I doing this correctly? Worrying that a rogue wave like in the George Clooney movie they filmed around here would come out of nowhere and steal her from my grasp and suck her out into the depths and drag me into a different kind of drowning.