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Sniper in the Brain (Six Time Signatures)

Author: 
Keith Jarrett

 

some times: good times, bad times, bedtimes, Sunday Times, rag time, drag story time, play time…

 

Two characters, like two hands of a clock, slide along your face:

 

The longest one, an abstract noun,                                    the shortest, a clown,

or a one-trick magician                                                           (whichever is the kinder description).

 

Both pull up their sleeves to reveal                                    you are its experimental object.

 

some times: Quick Time, you and me time, queer time, rosemary and thyme, one time, two time…
 

You are the target

And you are the prey                                                                         You are its victim withdrawn

To the sniper in the brain                                                                 To the shadows

Vain snip of a thing                                                                            You are the sniped at  

Cutting away at the day                                                                   Slipping away

Till you’re clippered and shorn                                                      Flat line

Unsure of yourself                                                                             Fast-fading anthem

You don’t know you’re born she says.

 

We are the random blip                                                                  of a three-minute-thirty-two track

like a half-second skip                                                                   of the universe’s melody.

 

some times: best times, better times, not here for a long time, right place, wrong times, song time…
 

{everybody sing along!}                                                                  Kisses the girls and makes us all

Time is the melody                                                                           Twisting balloons and then letting us fly.

Our mortality the score

Strum it with your knuckles                                                          Cruel clown the stuff of horror films

And it plays the wanker chord                                                      Won’t you scream and run for the

                                                                                                                 Church congregation screams, she sings 

Camp clown, with fists of love and hate                                   Happy Birthday at your memorial

Carries cheerleader pompoms, 2-4-6-

Clock-bender, so we’re always early and                                Camp clown, pulling down my smile to a

Simultaneously wound, bound to her fate.                            Talcum powdering your black hairs to

                                                                                                               Gay giddy gregarious beast

Cold clown with a party hat crown                                            Chasing us till the day that we rest in

Constantly in motion, won’t sit

 

some times: full time, half-time, [total eclipse…], dark times followed by mourning time

 

This is partially an elegy to those we’ve lost to the abstract noun:

[Blank] who never came home from the club

___ who left the chill out in an ambulance van

___ last seen on the way to meet some man from the app

___ another mishap

___ an ill-fated punch

___ unknown

___ fill in your own                        ___

 

extra times: times table, Times Square, not much time to spare, time off, timeshare…
 

Young Mother Time                                                                   Borne on the shoulders of history

Nursing you and me, boy                                                         Which was once the future

On the soured milk of our youth                                           Which was the twice-bitten fruit

In the corner of the room                                                        Offered by some serpent in a garden

We should have been grown by now                                   Which grew figs and pomegranates etc.                        

 

And we became lost in all these vines

We became lost in                                                      one more time

one more time

I’ve known tricksters

Tricksters who wait at crossroads

                                                                                                        Tricksters in costumes split to appear two ways

                                                                                                                          to those who approach from either end

 

Tricksters that befriend you, lead you to the sea

and then leave you adrift

                                                                                                            Eight-legged tricksters that lift their bodies up

                                                                                                                  through plugholes, crawl along your ceilings

An assortment of tricksters, manipulating your feelings

                                                                          or otherwise effecting miscellaneous mischiefs in the wee hours

I’ve known tricksters

but none quite as slippery as you

                                                                                                                                       Appearing in my bathroom mirror

                                                                                                    where it’s 9:25 (I could have sworn it was still 1993)

Trickster clown, making a mockery of our illusions

sliding along the skirting boards of our living rooms

                                                                                                                You gurn in the club bathrooms, hold our hats

                                                                                                                    while we brace against the bowl of our lives

Trickster pulling up your sleeves to reveal

                                                                                                                                   our names tattooed along your veins

                                                                                     Trickster clown

                                                                              Magician and mortician

We should have all known by now

                                                                                                                                                             We cannot survive you.

[end time]

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RELATED POEMS

Untitled

by
lisa luxx

        1.  self-mythology; ruin

 

I knew to tilt the vinyl just enough to warp the sound

              but not how to dip my face under water

              to see the boy in me drowning.

 

when the bible said jesus walked on water

it meant every one of us stands

              with an ocean underfoot.

 

most of us sink half our soul to seabeds. 

 

in my coming-of-age

                                        I tethered my boyhood to a sunken ship.

               boy soul, the son I could’ve been.

 

at nineteen young luxx was all fur coats and lingerie

              bowie grinning off the record player,

kid-come-woman still learning how to swim

              preoccupied with being the opposite of men.

 

shaved bare and shitless, tits up and clothes strewn across the room

ain’t no costume colder than that of the young woman.

 

 

       2.  Carl Jung; analysis

 

i've seen you, big man, locking

          horns as if the world were closing

in. a single seed in both fists

          show me your overwatered harvest,

lady soul perspiring through your skin

 

(she always escapes, btw

an underwater with wings).

 

with a record skipping on the deck,

             you press yourself into a woman

you just met, lamplight pouring shadows

              round the room.

 

Jung named an animated foreign body

             in the ocean of each of us,

saw men clawing back towards the womb

 

warned us if we neglect our opposite

             sex-      soul could lead to death.

 

gender.  the oldest weapon against ourself.

 

 

       3.  Amina Coming; disorder

 

bowie knew

when the tides come

her scent will intoxicate you

rising from drain holes

open windows

air vents blowing smoke

of thin cigarettes

you will drown in her

grinning too / unsure of why you’re grinning too.

 

big man, the abyss is always watching you.

look at us:

 

                        dusting eternity off our knees

                        rinsing shadows down plug holes

                        wiping soul off reading glasses,

                        we ain't clean right through.

 

she will be your living end.

 

my boy soul became suspended

beneath the record player needle,

abandoned song

 

                           humming haunt into my nudity.

 

water is how we measure fright.

if I had been all soil and winged,

I could've pretended I couldn't hear him

echoing through the emptiness, 

chasing me to hospital beds.

 

big man, you were in the bed beside me

no beetle cars, or musky scents.

we both swallowed too much sea.

you looked a lot like a part of me.

 

 

          4.   Amina Fought and Won; spiritual development

 

this small blue we shiver on

is a costume party

 

          but at 4am when the tides come in

          we’re tender, bare faced,

 

          clothes strewn across the floor.

          that breadcrumb trail of surrender.

 

          naked, walking round the room

          extractor fan blowing through a soul

          you can’t be told

          has always been chasing after you.

 

my boy soul was not my living end

I lay that belief on you.

 

the lady of your soul grins, laughing;

 

she will change your point of view

don’t be afraid of the shadows who seduce you.

flooding into this room

 

that grinning, half-sung, still singing

soul, will come will go.

Human Experience
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After Party / After Life An Underworld Conversation with Bowie

by
Mona Arshi

I say: Please… can I join you for a few moments in this sort of conjuring -I’m a fan?

 

He says: Sure. I’ve taken the pulse , I’ve taken the temperature here

in the afterlife, I’ve run so far away from myself and your hot bodies

I’ve parted  the willow trees hair pained myself in the water

I’ve studied the breathing moss

sampled some of  the delights of the underworld

all its potions and charms their versions of  snails 

and the true earthworms and the  hollyhocks and I’ve 

tamed my ear brought it down so close to hunt down

the  music and it’s all so inhalable and bright and all it’s all so so so

 

And I say : Tell me more, those are totemic lines…

 

And he says: You poets. You poets are all the same…

So much for your stomach-churning ambiguity

and your personas and sad fishing performances 

here the poets  take off their putrid costumes 

this is a party with a commitment to the 

afterwards where  the errant rules,  where the delinquent poets

are outed and placed in the middle of the treeless field 

naked as dusk -this is the afterlife after party

of  course I’m not going  hand it to you on

a steel  platter in  all straight lines.

 

And then he says:  

I’m going be wearing

my best version disguise painted  

in madder root -like  those quick footed clowns

all oozy like the mushrooms we picked

and I’ll tell you something else 

I find new  words here, language 

for the word when you ready yourself

for a photograph  tilting your head right back 

just so and a new word for the  moon snug in its pocket

embalmed and drunk in its bright yellow liquor 

 

I  say: ok  tell me about lyrical beauty again

I say if feeling is first then can  you tell me how it is for you

bring me out  poem if you can..

 

And he laughs says: all the sound engineers have gone home but 

Ok ….

I’ll attempt something in this dharmic frame

In the  blind moments of this insane 

Uncoupling from the breathing world 

It kind of feels pure and pellucid as pain

And yet writers reign

In full rhyme

 

And I say-thank-you. 

Thank you,

Aladdin Sane

 

And.. he goes quiet and says:

It was brave of me right to try on

the other parts myself right

all earthy and sweat and 

so blurry and the audience  there

bright or brittling like icicles 

caught in the mouth of a cave?

That’s the version of a life  I’m re-Sampling ,

it’s so beautiful and insane, the fire ants in their fedoras 

travelling along  the delicious veins

of the flowers …what a fucking party.

 

Then he says: 

You poets are all the same 

wielding your knives in the rafters 

practicing your moves 

but have you truly  watched  that man, 

there in the shadows 

are you watching him cut out his heart

not  content for the music to  resolve itself

sympathetically ..syntactically-unfolding -long cord of breath 

watch that man,

feed him the question to the answer 

we knew all along  

when the song begins to sting you have to stop.

Arts & Sciences
Human Experience
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Get Back On It

by
Luke Kennard
After Jean Genie / Jean Genet

                 There are worse fates than falling in love with a tightrope walker

                  but I don’t wanna hear em. My third wish was that I wanted 

                  to be really, really stupid. And hideously ugly? And hideously ugly, yes.

 

Like statues offered to the dead, statues of chimneys, dreams nursed in the limited world, dreams

slapped out of our mouths like cigarettes in a dressing down –Hold on that expression, cut to the

window. Back to the bed. Arm draped across the balustrade. Deep in the gulf of vice and woe –I

dropped you off an hour ago. 

 

                  We’re very concerned and amused by your actions,

                  a waiter eating our orders in the houses of illusion.

 

Let’s say you’re so lonely you hire a professional friend for £28 an hour. After several hours driving

around with him in a van, selling limited edition denim from industrial estate carparks to queues of

worried looking men, it occurs to you that you are paying £28 an hour to work. Worse yet he’s not

even particularly friendly – when you try to start a conversation he makes a little talking mouth signal

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They just want something real and slides up the divider.

 

                The first thing a narcissist will tell you is that you’re such a good judge of character.

                The best protection is total silence.

                The difference between a smile and a grin.

 

The van has been motionless for some time. Your friend has fallen asleep at the wheel. You open the

back doors of the van and you start sliding the racks of denim onto the road, over the verge and into

the river below. You watch a bleach-washed jacket float away then collapse on itself like an ice shelf.

 

                 You must go and meet some real people – it was your second wish;

                 The first was to be lonely. An establishment folk hero

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It is possible, with a little discipline, to replace suicidal ideation with a long-term inner life as a space 

pirate. Picture instead pulling back on the thrusters, the ship wobbling as it leaves the bay, leaning into

your massive chair as you cruise past Neptune, jettisoning eight hundred tonnes of nuclear waste near

the Kuiper Belt and then being gunned down by police ships. You ruined it.

 

                  It doesn’t matter. We’re all a little torn

                  between the sermon and the ode,

                  hagiography and reprimand,

 

It’s the same whenever we have the microphone, as if there were a record to set straight; let me tell

you about what he tells you about, what pleasures he shall ever find, his brands and sorrows. When he

wakes up he will scream, My jeans! My jeans! What have you done? And you will say, I had to get the

jump on you, I thought I did, I knew I did, I had to get the jump on you – besides, betrayal is so

beautiful.

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