I got carried away by my stubborn imagination -
I’d had this one song that I’d been working on. Well, not working on so much as I’d forgotten about it for a very long time, and I suddenly dredged it up one day while I was playing the guitar. That Day was a Tuesday Night, after I’d just finished playing another song that I’d completed, that I’m very satisfied with, it being what it is. So the song came back to mind, and I’d already, one of the first days that I’d gone off of my medication, decided that I’d change the meaning of the song and basically everything about it except the opening line. Bob Dylan’s “Twist Of Fate” and bipolar do that to you, apparently. During this, I was blessed by about an hour and a half of conversation I didn’t expect when Heather called, and later, I was surprised and moved from the comfort of what I thought I knew when I received another call, and insight. Thanks, Colin. It felt like something that I desperately needed, I needed that forcing me to become wide eyed and curious. Receptive to the revelations that reality can bring. So after having worked on the new lyrics of the song for a very good amount of time, I went to school. Psychology and Chorus went like they do, and there was a poetry reading going on that night. So I’d decided, since I’d get out of chorus before 3:00, that I’d bring my guitar and stay on campus until the reading started at 7. And I sat around, and played guitar a lot. Eventually writing new lyrics for the song and working on the skeleton of this other huge poem that I’ve still got in brief thoughts and elaborations all over on this piece of loose-leaf paper.
I get to the library’s meeting room where the reading’s to be held and notice that it is absolutely fucking packed. I find a seat next to Frank and Will from my Creative Writing class, and see Sander standing in front of the audience, at a podium all dressed up in a suit and all. We laugh for a bit, and he’s very professional as he announces the people who helped make the reading, as well as the book he edited, The Poets Of New Jersey, a reality. I remember not being completely blown away by the first poet, but I also don’t quite remember who it was. Oh! That’s right; it was Frank Finale, one of the editors. I don’t know why I just don’t delete the sentence where I say I don’t remember the guy’s name when I did, later. Perhaps it makes it more conversational, especially the “Oh!” I typed after I’d remembered, with the reader imagining the light bulb going off above my head and all. Whatever. Frank Finale. I remember not particularly liking his work. But then he pulled this poem out, and he’d written it about this picture that he and his siblings carried around with them of their deceased mother. It was a photograph of her, standing in a field of flowers, with her dress and long, dark hair being blown back by the wind. He described the photograph as
“A crushed rose in the bible of our selves.”
And I thought that that was just an extremely beautiful and affecting line of poetry, so I wrote it on my arm, and applauded vigorously at the poem’s end, despite having been told by Sander to wait until the poet’d finished all of their poems before applauding, ‘coz ’snot as though I ever follow Sander’s directions anyway, and I’d just been overwhelmed and caught off guard by the poem. After Frank got off of the podium, Emmanuel DiPasquale, I think the guy’s name was, another editor of the book, got on after him. He had an extremely native Italian accent, and he just, as Dan said, seemed so content with life and the way that things were for him, that he didn’t give second thought to interrupting his own poems to speak with the audience if he felt so moved. He read a poem about his family and children standing on the top of a hill, throwing flower petals to the wind, noting that he originally wrote “paint”, but the editors of his book at the time said that the environmentalists would have a fit. I wasn’t sure whether he was serious about that, but it was a funny detour, and flower petals worked better at any rate. So in that poem, there, we stood, hurling all of the colors to be carried off by the wind, to paint the world. Another poet read about a small Mother Mary from her Catholic school that’d be taken home in shifts by the different girls of the school, and her poem was about what happened when it was her turn. “Her one inch face held too much sadness to bear”, before she started to dance around with it, playing different “Ave Maria”s and breaking Mary, who “must have been real, to crack like that.”
Before I walked into the library for the reading, there were a couple of people standing outside, waiting for one to finish his cigarette. This man was short and stout, with balding hair, and a faint beard and moustache. He was loud, and raucous, with a pretty abrasive and brash voice and manner of speech. And I figured, just from how he took the world in that moment, that he was one of the poets who’d read that night.
“Joe Weil” was announced, and that man stepped up to the podium to take the name. After speaking for a moment, someone in the front of the audience said “Only took ya half a minute to start cursing up there, Joe. . .” to which Joe replied “Ah, well I’m getting old. Used to have it down in the first ten seconds.” He read a poem about a dying city, dirty and everything urban with a cup of coffee in the early morning, long dead wives in photographs above dusty, unsold pianos that he was privileged to play. And of Haitian nurses getting off of buses onto street corners after their overnight shifts, laughing and speaking to one another in their beautiful Patois, that he found more beautiful than the voices of angels. At the end of the poem, he prayed that he should be so blessed as to have voices as beautiful surround him in his final, peaceful moments.
He spoke about his youth, where his father would take him to different bars and he, as a young child, would play the pianos there while his father would drink for free, saying afterwards “I became an expert at playing out of tune pianos” And he sat down at the piano that Sander had requested for him, and began to play. Huge musick overwhelming and embracing, that instantly moves through any defenses or judgments or even conscious consideration about it. Never once minding to enter through the gates that people erect, where a keeper is summoned and the musick is interrogated before entering. It just permeated, and he started singing a poem of his that opened with the line “The winos rise as beautiful as deer” and he could’ve been playing for a couple of minutes, or dozens, and it all would have felt the same, with me entranced and eyes as open as my gaping mouth, astounded. The poem, the musick, and everything that is - blend into a single simple thing, as though to say “Yes. There is beauty here.” Every thing that exists deserves the graces of our most elegant and moving ruminations.
Silence. After something has happened that reaffirms your every Hope, there is nothing more appropriate than silence, and allowing everything amazed about you to shine through, for all to take in and know.
B.J. Ward began saying “I read this for someone who is here but who can not read it for himself - Walt Whitman.” Ward’s voice was constantly rising, gritty, sincerely dramatic, frankly nearly biting and caustic, poetic, and honest. He spoke a bit about his father before he started to read a poem that he’d written with him in it. His inflection made obvious the tragedy in the admirable diligence of his father that the letters on the page didn’t scream. Thanking the people who were to be thanked for his inclusion in the book, he came close to stopping, almost stumbling, saying “. . . it’s wonderful . . . I don’t know what else to say.” And grateful, the poet was without words.
X.J. Kennedy lived on the street next to mine. He and Ginsberg shared a teacher sometime, and would send each other Christmas cards. When Ginsberg passed away in ’97, he felt a great loss, from this kinship that he couldn’t really explain, since stylistically, they were the farthest thing from contemporaries. Knowing that he and Ginsberg both shared a love of Blake, he wrote a poem mimicking “Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright.” Before he started singing this long, humorous poem about a drunken old woman carrying on in a bar, telling all young ladies to marry young, so they won’t become who she is, talking up men in her familiar bar hoping her now gone beauty will buy her a drink, or smack to cater to her still present addictions, he asked in the middle of apologizing for his singing voice beforehand, "If I didn't sing my songs, who would?".
At the completion of the reading, we were released from our audience-poet boundaries and seats, allowed to crash into one another like two spilled containers of milk with their liberated liquids lively lunging towards one another. And I drank coffee, standing around a table with some friends, talking, when I noticed that Joe Weil stood next to me, getting some coffee of his own. I waited until he was finished talking to other people and writing out autographs, and got his attention. And I said “I want to say that I really admire and respect your work.” And then felt my face practically going red (If it does, I don’t know) from having mustered up courage enough only for some trite and oft-heard praise, so I then said “And I hope that I don’t offend you or that you take this the wrong way, but . . . in spite of you, your poetry has beauty that is just overwhelming and ultimate.” And he looked me in the eyes, quiet a moment, and spoke up, still looking me in the eyes, saying “Thank you.” And he’d spotted the huge case of an acoustic guitar with bronze strings sticking from its head, and asked me if I played. I told him that I did, and after not coming up with a genre or style (As though I could), he asked me if I’d play a song for him when he went outside in a bit. And I said of course I would. So I nervously, awkwardly, hung out with my friends in the room until they, two by two, walked away and headed home.
I waited outside for a short while as well, nervous as all hell, wondering what I could possibly play for him that would be good enough. I walked back inside, catching a bit of some news show on the television, and used the bathroom, amazed from the immensity of the readings. I sat in the lobby of the library to write a poem, and while I was writing, Joe Weil and his son walked past, and Joe, returned to his brash mannerisms, asked me “So am I gonna get to hear you play the song or what?” and I told him I’d be out after I finished the poem. Which I did, figuring he’d stay for another cigarette outside of the library. I walked out of the library and didn’t see him anywhere. I cursed myself, and started walking, realizing that I could see him off in the distance of the darkened outside of the CCM campus. I shifted, pacing back and forth at least five times between chasing him down and just letting things be, cursing myself all the while, and telling myself how miserable I’d be if I didn’t. So I plunged, running after them for a moment before his son noticed me and alerted his father. And Joe spun right around, and hurried my way. We finally met up at the top of a stairway, where I, after all of that, confessed I didn’t really have too many things finished that I was proud of, that I had a bunch of incomplete songs, which he didn’t mind. He said “Hey, I’ve never heard any of your stuff, so anything you play will be new to me.” So I, on a whim, started the song I’d been working on Tuesday Night and that day. The refrain section I can only play loudly, because I have to, for the song. After I’d finished what I had done of it, he reached into my guitar case and picked up the sheet I’d written the lyrics on, reading, while I told him and his son about the Rimbaud poem that originally inspired it (His son’s a huge Rimbaud fan too), and how it’d changed a little while ago in my mind from a song about a sleeper in the valley to a tragedy paralleling the life of a soldier in the Viet Nam war to his life later as a drunkard beggar. And we spoke about the musick for a brief moment. I still can’t believe it, but I had impressed Joe. Even nervous, premeditating anxiously every moment and word (Which can kill the flow), I had impressed Joe Weil, a poet that I admire and respect endlessly. Who’s work serves as a testament that poetry is not dead, that American modernists do not only dwell in complacency, that there is beauty so powerful it refuses to be dissected line by line, and must be acknowledged, that poetry is, indeed (And it is, indeed) what Mr. Keimel taught me in my sophomore year of high school, in the classroom where I first started to discover my own voice, when the teacher who became more of a mentor and an inspiration to me than what just about all other teachers have become, authority figures to disagree with actively only to later meet on neutral grounds to realize they’re nothing that can kill or even stop me for a half-second, when he gave the technical definition of poetry for a second, to dismiss it later, incorrect, and told us something so important and huge that it felt like a secret, when he defined, with a voice that could be nothing but confident with this truth behind it, defining POETRY as “Anything that makes you feel.” And Joe Weil, a man who knows and exemplifies ALL OF THIS in his work, stood before me in the dim lighting of the walkways of the campus’ outsides, as I shivered from nervousness over my guitar, with my words in his hands, Joe Weil stood before me as I was emotionally naked, impressed. He told me to get in touch with him through Sander when I next had him for classes, because he was very interested in hearing more of my writing and songs. And that in New Brunswick, every once in a while, he has this gathering, where he gets poets and musicians from different places, and everyone hangs out, reading their work and playing their songs for one another, and that if I was interested, I could attend. He said there were people from all over, poets and musicians and just cool people together. He asked me if I knew of the band the Slackers, because Joe Ruggerio was one of the people who regularly shows. Of course I told him that I’d definitely get in touch with him as soon as I was able to, and he shook my hand before we said goodbye, and I continued to walk, brimming with excitement that I couldn’t have quelled if I’d attempted.
What he described to me sounded so much like so many bohemian gatherings that I might only be able to imagine tapping into. Some splendid breeding ground for the worship of Muses. After I’ve been, for so long, trying for something, all the while of course writing poems and songs that I’d never downplay by saying they aren’t all I am, and that I’m not trying my best, knowing that the world can be brought to its knees under the gravity of one emotional, honest, and simple perfect song, or poem, with just me and myself terrified of complacency, furiously burning with the fire of the Muses I’ve given my body and everything to, wondering how I could concentrate these poems and songs into removing the most vital bricks of normalcy, allowing what is magnificent, splendid, and what could never be plain to shine through the cracks of the wall, eventually to illuminate like the Sun, with no inhibiting wall or barrier to even take into consideration. This may be it, my first opportunity that I know is too good to not milk for all its worth. So I breathe, and wait until I can take hold of what I can, refusing to relent.
I walked to the exit on the way to my car, and stopped in the smoking section, allowing myself a cigarette and time for reflection. I sighed, satisfied, feeling for the first time I could remember after something enormous and wonderful had happened, if there were any other times before it to remember, completely content, and as though there wasn’t a single thing that I would have done differently. I noticed Jesse walking out of the building, and I called to him, and he walked to me, obviously tired and seemingly sedated and confused from his exhaustion, and I just told him what had happened, and how euphoric I felt. And then I listened to his day, and he told me why it was that he’d been so flustered when he’d first seen me. We spoke, standing there, before walking to our cars, and we actually got into his car after he’d turned the heat on because of the cold, and we stayed there, talking about musick, and art, and Andy Kaufman, and how the things that make life worth living can suddenly sneak up behind you, life-hope-and-beauty-affirming.
I got into my car, and headed to the nearby gas station to put air into my tire. As I did so, a guy from my chorus class walked up and greeted me, and said he’d return after getting cigarettes from the convenience store connected to the station. I started filling the tire with air, and was completely freaked the fuck out when he showed up behind me, startling me from my thoughts. He apologized, and he asked if I could give him a ride, since he’d just walked from home to get smokes, which I of course said yes to. We shot the shit for a bit, and when I was done with my tire, I told him to move my acoustic from the front seat into the back, and he asked me whether I played. I told him that I didn’t really, being a singer foremost, that I only played the guitar in most cases to have an instrument to sing over in the first place, and he told me that he was in a band that was just starting up. He used to be the rhythm guitarist and the singer, until he pretty much threw out his voice and decided he wasn’t fit to be a singer in the first place, and after a little more talking while I drove him home, he asked if I might be interested in hearing them and becoming their singer, because they got a new bassist recently and were very excited, becoming more serious an endeavor. I was psyched, and he took my number before getting out of the car and thanking me.
I got home too excited by life to sleep. You can’t blame me. I worked on the lyrics of the song for hours and hours, and something else too, I think. Oh yeah, Monday I skipped chorus class, favoring instead to spend the entire day with this girl. I met her at 2:20 walking to my class, and we didn’t say goodbye until I dropped her off at her car, near ten o’ clock, outside of Border’s. Good day. Thursday came, and it’s difficult to really think about the day “starting” at any particular point if you’ve not slept at all. It’s all the same state of consciousness, the events almost bleed together, except for the hours and hours during the night until the sun rises you spend in complete isolation. I have begun to understand Rainer Maria Rilke’s belief that isolation is necessary (But really, not definitely necessary) and conducive to the artist. It allows for unrelenting and intense introspection. And I’ve found, if my whole is consumed with work as a musician or as a poet, that there is a peace within myself, fixated on my craft.
I ended up staying home during my Spanish class at 1, missing a test, I think. Opting instead for not a single pause or distraction while working on completing the song that I’d performed for Joe Weil the Night before. I worked until I decided to shower, and then headed to the school, where I continued to work for a bit, ending up creating a section in the song that is almost completely open, for me to interpret and improvise as needed, where no matter what particular road I take, it all not only ends the song up on the path it has to take, but something about the way that I have to play it, or the way that I have to sing it, or the place that the speaker is coming from, that just completely envelopes me, which is vital to the performance and emotion. I printed up the lyrics, making copies for everyone in my Creative Writing class, and got to the class. I performed the song, realizing that despite however nervous and stifled I may have been at the beginning of it, when I approached the free section, I saw myself for a moment after playing it, and I realized that I got completely caught up in playing it. Where the audience is still there and receiving, and I could see them, but I didn’t think about them. I don’t think about myself. My only focus had become the song, and the expression of the emotions of the character that I become during that section. I had lost myself, completely caught up in the musick, 'coz it’s just frantic, and it latches on to a particular phrase or confession that has no set melody, so it’s sung differently every time, and it’s fast and loud, and intense, before it cracks like glass and falls away from the lyrics, where the guitar takes the stage for a moment, with me playing loud enough to silence a riot, so I can ride the wave of where the prior section’d landed me. And then it rises again to a familiar place in the song, still with the voice that carried the musick there, and I could do nothing but play it as loud as the voice feels. (Which’s loud.) And from that, quiet, and finally, peace, and the song rises again, to the places it’d gone before, except they feel differently. The frustration and misery had been replaced, lyrically and sonically, with the newly found peace, and Hope. Which is the chord that the song ends on. Forgetting inhibitions and everything else except the song that you're playing, neverminding what people'll think of how you're singing or how you're moving or anything, is the best way I can imagine performing musick. That place is Zen.
I don’t particularly remember anyone else’s response to it being exceptionally memorable, except Sander said, maybe not even realizing what a compliment it was, “That was really emotional.”, to which I could only smile. I timed the song as it is completed, after that, on Friday morning, and the song's something like 8 minutes long. It could have been three or four, it never seems so long to me while I'm playing it. I lose myself.
After class, Frank, Will, Jesse, Chris, and I went to the Randolph diner. The waiter that we always get doesn’t even ask for ids anymore, I’m pretty sure it’s ‘coz he’s so cool and we tip so well. Jack Daniel’s, and Bass beer (Jesse is very proud of himself for having given me an appreciation for it) kept our attention, with the discussion moving from girls to poems to the work of the other students, back to girls, and all over the place later, interrupted only by bathroom and cigarette breaks. By the end of the Night, we had to come up with plans, some of us being way too drunk to’ve driven home then. So it’s decided Will and Jesse, who’re too incapacitated to go home, are to head to Frank’s basement, since his house’s very close to where we were, in Frank’s truck to sober up. And since Will and Jesse are some of my coolest friends in that group, I go with them. We sit in his basement, playing guitar and watching The Daily Show for a little bit, before we feel bad for having woken up Frank’s dad (Well, it was only one of us. But still, three strangers with alcohol in their bodies in your basement that your son’s brought from class isn’t a great thing to wake up to at maybe one in the morning), and we head back to the diner. I was driving because I actually hadn’t had that much to drink, a good many hours before I got into the car. We return to the diner and go inside, the two still needing more time to sober up, and we all get coffee, and they get food to help them along. Diego’s got the History Channel on, and most of our conversation after a while centered around the program that was on, which showed the tsunami, captured on video cameras. They played the aftermath early in the program, and then came to that. It was torturous, and entrancing. We couldn’t have possibly had conversations about anything else while people on the television were screaming from terror, or mourning, and people were dying on the screen.
In the parking lot, Jesse and I say goodbye to Will and we’re in Jesse’s car to listen to musick for a while (Another sobering up ritual Jesse and I’ve got), and Will walks to the car to tell us his car won’t start. So we look for jumper cables in Jesse’s car and in my own, to no avail. Will asks inside if anyone has jumper cables, and Diego goes to check, but he doesn’t. So Jesse decides we’re going to take Will home, because despite Will’s desire not to be of too much trouble, we know that he’d probably sleep in his car and miss work the next morning rather than wake his parents up at three something in the morning, living as far away as they do. So after a bit, we’re speeding on 80 with only 18-wheeled trucks to keep us company, cigarettes lit in three of the six hands, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club blasting on the car’s stereo, bluesy and dark, rocking urgently. We deviated from highways after a bit, going along rural roads Will wrote into directions for our way home, and Jesse would kill his headlights, speeding down the darkest roads you might ever see, fucked up and insane rock & roll screaming and broadcasting from the car, which has been turned into One. Serious. Vehicle. We reached Will’s road after maybe forty-something minutes speeding the entire way, we were far closer to cities in Pennsylvania than the school we started at. We drove down to the end of the road Will had grown up on, which he’d written a short story about early on in the class so beautiful I almost cried back then. When we reached the dead end of the road, we all got out of the car to pee, and then I looked up. And we were so distant from anything else there, any town, other houses, cities, or anything, that the sky was completely clear. I don’t know if you really understand what I mean by “completely”. I mean that you could see everything. It was the most spectacular sky that I have ever seen. Never before have I had so many stars in a single scene. It was breathtakingly beautiful. And Will was, in that moment, the older brother familiar with it that could lead us through. We saw satellites moving across the stars, feigning their image but distinguishable. I’d never seen a satellite before. Later, a star shot across the Night, and Jesse’d never seen a shooting star before. Jesse and I were in awe of it the entire time, discussing Einstein’s Line Theory, the fabric of time, poetry, recalling lines of each other’s poems in the conversation, and I am forever grateful that Jesse was willing to drive Will back so that we could have seen what we did. And the both of us wouldn’t have been able to sleep that Night had we merely abandoned Will to the cold, fucked and floating down the river without a paddle, or even anything to grab hold of.
Despite Will’s expert directions, Jesse and I of course got lost, listening to Bauhaus and Suede, eventually working our way back on to the directions and route 80, where we were on familiar ground once more. Jesse, I think, really wants for me to fall in love with Christian Death. And I may. As he does, he recited the lyrics to me for clarification moments before Roz sang them on the speakers. Jesse is a lot older than I am (Let’s just say you can double my age and subtract four years to get his age), and he’d said earlier, drunk and at the diner, that he knows that he moves in and out of peoples’ lives, and he hoped that he’s affected me and at least taught me some things through the times that we’ve talked, or what has got to be the couple of hours we’ve spent in his car, silent, him playing musick for me that I’d either never or only heard of before. Roxy Music, Slowdive, Suede, some killer Bowie, lots and lots of Christian Death, Bauhaus, things that he was into as a young kid, that he knows I’ve never really had much exposure to or understanding of. We got off at the wrong exit on 80 after missing the ones we should have taken, so we got into Denville and rode up 46 into Dover, eventually getting to the Randolph Diner again, at 6:00 a.m., as the sun was rising. I stayed in the car for a while, listening to a couple of different songs that Jesse still wanted me to hear. And got into my car (Jesse waited to make sure that my car started) and got to my room around 6:30. I occupied myself for a bit before going to school for poetry, after which I hung out with some friends in the cafeteria, and then spent two or three hours finishing an assignment in the library before leaving it in Sander’s mailbox. I passed out almost as soon as I got home at 4 p.m., not to wake again until 9 a.m. on Saturday, to return to dreaming until 2 p.m., to start my mostly useless weekend.
And I really really didn't mean to spend these past nearly four hours in the library of CCM typing this up. Things just happen sometimes, man.
I get to the library’s meeting room where the reading’s to be held and notice that it is absolutely fucking packed. I find a seat next to Frank and Will from my Creative Writing class, and see Sander standing in front of the audience, at a podium all dressed up in a suit and all. We laugh for a bit, and he’s very professional as he announces the people who helped make the reading, as well as the book he edited, The Poets Of New Jersey, a reality. I remember not being completely blown away by the first poet, but I also don’t quite remember who it was. Oh! That’s right; it was Frank Finale, one of the editors. I don’t know why I just don’t delete the sentence where I say I don’t remember the guy’s name when I did, later. Perhaps it makes it more conversational, especially the “Oh!” I typed after I’d remembered, with the reader imagining the light bulb going off above my head and all. Whatever. Frank Finale. I remember not particularly liking his work. But then he pulled this poem out, and he’d written it about this picture that he and his siblings carried around with them of their deceased mother. It was a photograph of her, standing in a field of flowers, with her dress and long, dark hair being blown back by the wind. He described the photograph as
“A crushed rose in the bible of our selves.”
And I thought that that was just an extremely beautiful and affecting line of poetry, so I wrote it on my arm, and applauded vigorously at the poem’s end, despite having been told by Sander to wait until the poet’d finished all of their poems before applauding, ‘coz ’snot as though I ever follow Sander’s directions anyway, and I’d just been overwhelmed and caught off guard by the poem. After Frank got off of the podium, Emmanuel DiPasquale, I think the guy’s name was, another editor of the book, got on after him. He had an extremely native Italian accent, and he just, as Dan said, seemed so content with life and the way that things were for him, that he didn’t give second thought to interrupting his own poems to speak with the audience if he felt so moved. He read a poem about his family and children standing on the top of a hill, throwing flower petals to the wind, noting that he originally wrote “paint”, but the editors of his book at the time said that the environmentalists would have a fit. I wasn’t sure whether he was serious about that, but it was a funny detour, and flower petals worked better at any rate. So in that poem, there, we stood, hurling all of the colors to be carried off by the wind, to paint the world. Another poet read about a small Mother Mary from her Catholic school that’d be taken home in shifts by the different girls of the school, and her poem was about what happened when it was her turn. “Her one inch face held too much sadness to bear”, before she started to dance around with it, playing different “Ave Maria”s and breaking Mary, who “must have been real, to crack like that.”
Before I walked into the library for the reading, there were a couple of people standing outside, waiting for one to finish his cigarette. This man was short and stout, with balding hair, and a faint beard and moustache. He was loud, and raucous, with a pretty abrasive and brash voice and manner of speech. And I figured, just from how he took the world in that moment, that he was one of the poets who’d read that night.
“Joe Weil” was announced, and that man stepped up to the podium to take the name. After speaking for a moment, someone in the front of the audience said “Only took ya half a minute to start cursing up there, Joe. . .” to which Joe replied “Ah, well I’m getting old. Used to have it down in the first ten seconds.” He read a poem about a dying city, dirty and everything urban with a cup of coffee in the early morning, long dead wives in photographs above dusty, unsold pianos that he was privileged to play. And of Haitian nurses getting off of buses onto street corners after their overnight shifts, laughing and speaking to one another in their beautiful Patois, that he found more beautiful than the voices of angels. At the end of the poem, he prayed that he should be so blessed as to have voices as beautiful surround him in his final, peaceful moments.
He spoke about his youth, where his father would take him to different bars and he, as a young child, would play the pianos there while his father would drink for free, saying afterwards “I became an expert at playing out of tune pianos” And he sat down at the piano that Sander had requested for him, and began to play. Huge musick overwhelming and embracing, that instantly moves through any defenses or judgments or even conscious consideration about it. Never once minding to enter through the gates that people erect, where a keeper is summoned and the musick is interrogated before entering. It just permeated, and he started singing a poem of his that opened with the line “The winos rise as beautiful as deer” and he could’ve been playing for a couple of minutes, or dozens, and it all would have felt the same, with me entranced and eyes as open as my gaping mouth, astounded. The poem, the musick, and everything that is - blend into a single simple thing, as though to say “Yes. There is beauty here.” Every thing that exists deserves the graces of our most elegant and moving ruminations.
Silence. After something has happened that reaffirms your every Hope, there is nothing more appropriate than silence, and allowing everything amazed about you to shine through, for all to take in and know.
B.J. Ward began saying “I read this for someone who is here but who can not read it for himself - Walt Whitman.” Ward’s voice was constantly rising, gritty, sincerely dramatic, frankly nearly biting and caustic, poetic, and honest. He spoke a bit about his father before he started to read a poem that he’d written with him in it. His inflection made obvious the tragedy in the admirable diligence of his father that the letters on the page didn’t scream. Thanking the people who were to be thanked for his inclusion in the book, he came close to stopping, almost stumbling, saying “. . . it’s wonderful . . . I don’t know what else to say.” And grateful, the poet was without words.
X.J. Kennedy lived on the street next to mine. He and Ginsberg shared a teacher sometime, and would send each other Christmas cards. When Ginsberg passed away in ’97, he felt a great loss, from this kinship that he couldn’t really explain, since stylistically, they were the farthest thing from contemporaries. Knowing that he and Ginsberg both shared a love of Blake, he wrote a poem mimicking “Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright.” Before he started singing this long, humorous poem about a drunken old woman carrying on in a bar, telling all young ladies to marry young, so they won’t become who she is, talking up men in her familiar bar hoping her now gone beauty will buy her a drink, or smack to cater to her still present addictions, he asked in the middle of apologizing for his singing voice beforehand, "If I didn't sing my songs, who would?".
At the completion of the reading, we were released from our audience-poet boundaries and seats, allowed to crash into one another like two spilled containers of milk with their liberated liquids lively lunging towards one another. And I drank coffee, standing around a table with some friends, talking, when I noticed that Joe Weil stood next to me, getting some coffee of his own. I waited until he was finished talking to other people and writing out autographs, and got his attention. And I said “I want to say that I really admire and respect your work.” And then felt my face practically going red (If it does, I don’t know) from having mustered up courage enough only for some trite and oft-heard praise, so I then said “And I hope that I don’t offend you or that you take this the wrong way, but . . . in spite of you, your poetry has beauty that is just overwhelming and ultimate.” And he looked me in the eyes, quiet a moment, and spoke up, still looking me in the eyes, saying “Thank you.” And he’d spotted the huge case of an acoustic guitar with bronze strings sticking from its head, and asked me if I played. I told him that I did, and after not coming up with a genre or style (As though I could), he asked me if I’d play a song for him when he went outside in a bit. And I said of course I would. So I nervously, awkwardly, hung out with my friends in the room until they, two by two, walked away and headed home.
I waited outside for a short while as well, nervous as all hell, wondering what I could possibly play for him that would be good enough. I walked back inside, catching a bit of some news show on the television, and used the bathroom, amazed from the immensity of the readings. I sat in the lobby of the library to write a poem, and while I was writing, Joe Weil and his son walked past, and Joe, returned to his brash mannerisms, asked me “So am I gonna get to hear you play the song or what?” and I told him I’d be out after I finished the poem. Which I did, figuring he’d stay for another cigarette outside of the library. I walked out of the library and didn’t see him anywhere. I cursed myself, and started walking, realizing that I could see him off in the distance of the darkened outside of the CCM campus. I shifted, pacing back and forth at least five times between chasing him down and just letting things be, cursing myself all the while, and telling myself how miserable I’d be if I didn’t. So I plunged, running after them for a moment before his son noticed me and alerted his father. And Joe spun right around, and hurried my way. We finally met up at the top of a stairway, where I, after all of that, confessed I didn’t really have too many things finished that I was proud of, that I had a bunch of incomplete songs, which he didn’t mind. He said “Hey, I’ve never heard any of your stuff, so anything you play will be new to me.” So I, on a whim, started the song I’d been working on Tuesday Night and that day. The refrain section I can only play loudly, because I have to, for the song. After I’d finished what I had done of it, he reached into my guitar case and picked up the sheet I’d written the lyrics on, reading, while I told him and his son about the Rimbaud poem that originally inspired it (His son’s a huge Rimbaud fan too), and how it’d changed a little while ago in my mind from a song about a sleeper in the valley to a tragedy paralleling the life of a soldier in the Viet Nam war to his life later as a drunkard beggar. And we spoke about the musick for a brief moment. I still can’t believe it, but I had impressed Joe. Even nervous, premeditating anxiously every moment and word (Which can kill the flow), I had impressed Joe Weil, a poet that I admire and respect endlessly. Who’s work serves as a testament that poetry is not dead, that American modernists do not only dwell in complacency, that there is beauty so powerful it refuses to be dissected line by line, and must be acknowledged, that poetry is, indeed (And it is, indeed) what Mr. Keimel taught me in my sophomore year of high school, in the classroom where I first started to discover my own voice, when the teacher who became more of a mentor and an inspiration to me than what just about all other teachers have become, authority figures to disagree with actively only to later meet on neutral grounds to realize they’re nothing that can kill or even stop me for a half-second, when he gave the technical definition of poetry for a second, to dismiss it later, incorrect, and told us something so important and huge that it felt like a secret, when he defined, with a voice that could be nothing but confident with this truth behind it, defining POETRY as “Anything that makes you feel.” And Joe Weil, a man who knows and exemplifies ALL OF THIS in his work, stood before me in the dim lighting of the walkways of the campus’ outsides, as I shivered from nervousness over my guitar, with my words in his hands, Joe Weil stood before me as I was emotionally naked, impressed. He told me to get in touch with him through Sander when I next had him for classes, because he was very interested in hearing more of my writing and songs. And that in New Brunswick, every once in a while, he has this gathering, where he gets poets and musicians from different places, and everyone hangs out, reading their work and playing their songs for one another, and that if I was interested, I could attend. He said there were people from all over, poets and musicians and just cool people together. He asked me if I knew of the band the Slackers, because Joe Ruggerio was one of the people who regularly shows. Of course I told him that I’d definitely get in touch with him as soon as I was able to, and he shook my hand before we said goodbye, and I continued to walk, brimming with excitement that I couldn’t have quelled if I’d attempted.
What he described to me sounded so much like so many bohemian gatherings that I might only be able to imagine tapping into. Some splendid breeding ground for the worship of Muses. After I’ve been, for so long, trying for something, all the while of course writing poems and songs that I’d never downplay by saying they aren’t all I am, and that I’m not trying my best, knowing that the world can be brought to its knees under the gravity of one emotional, honest, and simple perfect song, or poem, with just me and myself terrified of complacency, furiously burning with the fire of the Muses I’ve given my body and everything to, wondering how I could concentrate these poems and songs into removing the most vital bricks of normalcy, allowing what is magnificent, splendid, and what could never be plain to shine through the cracks of the wall, eventually to illuminate like the Sun, with no inhibiting wall or barrier to even take into consideration. This may be it, my first opportunity that I know is too good to not milk for all its worth. So I breathe, and wait until I can take hold of what I can, refusing to relent.
I walked to the exit on the way to my car, and stopped in the smoking section, allowing myself a cigarette and time for reflection. I sighed, satisfied, feeling for the first time I could remember after something enormous and wonderful had happened, if there were any other times before it to remember, completely content, and as though there wasn’t a single thing that I would have done differently. I noticed Jesse walking out of the building, and I called to him, and he walked to me, obviously tired and seemingly sedated and confused from his exhaustion, and I just told him what had happened, and how euphoric I felt. And then I listened to his day, and he told me why it was that he’d been so flustered when he’d first seen me. We spoke, standing there, before walking to our cars, and we actually got into his car after he’d turned the heat on because of the cold, and we stayed there, talking about musick, and art, and Andy Kaufman, and how the things that make life worth living can suddenly sneak up behind you, life-hope-and-beauty-affirming.
I got into my car, and headed to the nearby gas station to put air into my tire. As I did so, a guy from my chorus class walked up and greeted me, and said he’d return after getting cigarettes from the convenience store connected to the station. I started filling the tire with air, and was completely freaked the fuck out when he showed up behind me, startling me from my thoughts. He apologized, and he asked if I could give him a ride, since he’d just walked from home to get smokes, which I of course said yes to. We shot the shit for a bit, and when I was done with my tire, I told him to move my acoustic from the front seat into the back, and he asked me whether I played. I told him that I didn’t really, being a singer foremost, that I only played the guitar in most cases to have an instrument to sing over in the first place, and he told me that he was in a band that was just starting up. He used to be the rhythm guitarist and the singer, until he pretty much threw out his voice and decided he wasn’t fit to be a singer in the first place, and after a little more talking while I drove him home, he asked if I might be interested in hearing them and becoming their singer, because they got a new bassist recently and were very excited, becoming more serious an endeavor. I was psyched, and he took my number before getting out of the car and thanking me.
I got home too excited by life to sleep. You can’t blame me. I worked on the lyrics of the song for hours and hours, and something else too, I think. Oh yeah, Monday I skipped chorus class, favoring instead to spend the entire day with this girl. I met her at 2:20 walking to my class, and we didn’t say goodbye until I dropped her off at her car, near ten o’ clock, outside of Border’s. Good day. Thursday came, and it’s difficult to really think about the day “starting” at any particular point if you’ve not slept at all. It’s all the same state of consciousness, the events almost bleed together, except for the hours and hours during the night until the sun rises you spend in complete isolation. I have begun to understand Rainer Maria Rilke’s belief that isolation is necessary (But really, not definitely necessary) and conducive to the artist. It allows for unrelenting and intense introspection. And I’ve found, if my whole is consumed with work as a musician or as a poet, that there is a peace within myself, fixated on my craft.
I ended up staying home during my Spanish class at 1, missing a test, I think. Opting instead for not a single pause or distraction while working on completing the song that I’d performed for Joe Weil the Night before. I worked until I decided to shower, and then headed to the school, where I continued to work for a bit, ending up creating a section in the song that is almost completely open, for me to interpret and improvise as needed, where no matter what particular road I take, it all not only ends the song up on the path it has to take, but something about the way that I have to play it, or the way that I have to sing it, or the place that the speaker is coming from, that just completely envelopes me, which is vital to the performance and emotion. I printed up the lyrics, making copies for everyone in my Creative Writing class, and got to the class. I performed the song, realizing that despite however nervous and stifled I may have been at the beginning of it, when I approached the free section, I saw myself for a moment after playing it, and I realized that I got completely caught up in playing it. Where the audience is still there and receiving, and I could see them, but I didn’t think about them. I don’t think about myself. My only focus had become the song, and the expression of the emotions of the character that I become during that section. I had lost myself, completely caught up in the musick, 'coz it’s just frantic, and it latches on to a particular phrase or confession that has no set melody, so it’s sung differently every time, and it’s fast and loud, and intense, before it cracks like glass and falls away from the lyrics, where the guitar takes the stage for a moment, with me playing loud enough to silence a riot, so I can ride the wave of where the prior section’d landed me. And then it rises again to a familiar place in the song, still with the voice that carried the musick there, and I could do nothing but play it as loud as the voice feels. (Which’s loud.) And from that, quiet, and finally, peace, and the song rises again, to the places it’d gone before, except they feel differently. The frustration and misery had been replaced, lyrically and sonically, with the newly found peace, and Hope. Which is the chord that the song ends on. Forgetting inhibitions and everything else except the song that you're playing, neverminding what people'll think of how you're singing or how you're moving or anything, is the best way I can imagine performing musick. That place is Zen.
I don’t particularly remember anyone else’s response to it being exceptionally memorable, except Sander said, maybe not even realizing what a compliment it was, “That was really emotional.”, to which I could only smile. I timed the song as it is completed, after that, on Friday morning, and the song's something like 8 minutes long. It could have been three or four, it never seems so long to me while I'm playing it. I lose myself.
After class, Frank, Will, Jesse, Chris, and I went to the Randolph diner. The waiter that we always get doesn’t even ask for ids anymore, I’m pretty sure it’s ‘coz he’s so cool and we tip so well. Jack Daniel’s, and Bass beer (Jesse is very proud of himself for having given me an appreciation for it) kept our attention, with the discussion moving from girls to poems to the work of the other students, back to girls, and all over the place later, interrupted only by bathroom and cigarette breaks. By the end of the Night, we had to come up with plans, some of us being way too drunk to’ve driven home then. So it’s decided Will and Jesse, who’re too incapacitated to go home, are to head to Frank’s basement, since his house’s very close to where we were, in Frank’s truck to sober up. And since Will and Jesse are some of my coolest friends in that group, I go with them. We sit in his basement, playing guitar and watching The Daily Show for a little bit, before we feel bad for having woken up Frank’s dad (Well, it was only one of us. But still, three strangers with alcohol in their bodies in your basement that your son’s brought from class isn’t a great thing to wake up to at maybe one in the morning), and we head back to the diner. I was driving because I actually hadn’t had that much to drink, a good many hours before I got into the car. We return to the diner and go inside, the two still needing more time to sober up, and we all get coffee, and they get food to help them along. Diego’s got the History Channel on, and most of our conversation after a while centered around the program that was on, which showed the tsunami, captured on video cameras. They played the aftermath early in the program, and then came to that. It was torturous, and entrancing. We couldn’t have possibly had conversations about anything else while people on the television were screaming from terror, or mourning, and people were dying on the screen.
In the parking lot, Jesse and I say goodbye to Will and we’re in Jesse’s car to listen to musick for a while (Another sobering up ritual Jesse and I’ve got), and Will walks to the car to tell us his car won’t start. So we look for jumper cables in Jesse’s car and in my own, to no avail. Will asks inside if anyone has jumper cables, and Diego goes to check, but he doesn’t. So Jesse decides we’re going to take Will home, because despite Will’s desire not to be of too much trouble, we know that he’d probably sleep in his car and miss work the next morning rather than wake his parents up at three something in the morning, living as far away as they do. So after a bit, we’re speeding on 80 with only 18-wheeled trucks to keep us company, cigarettes lit in three of the six hands, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club blasting on the car’s stereo, bluesy and dark, rocking urgently. We deviated from highways after a bit, going along rural roads Will wrote into directions for our way home, and Jesse would kill his headlights, speeding down the darkest roads you might ever see, fucked up and insane rock & roll screaming and broadcasting from the car, which has been turned into One. Serious. Vehicle. We reached Will’s road after maybe forty-something minutes speeding the entire way, we were far closer to cities in Pennsylvania than the school we started at. We drove down to the end of the road Will had grown up on, which he’d written a short story about early on in the class so beautiful I almost cried back then. When we reached the dead end of the road, we all got out of the car to pee, and then I looked up. And we were so distant from anything else there, any town, other houses, cities, or anything, that the sky was completely clear. I don’t know if you really understand what I mean by “completely”. I mean that you could see everything. It was the most spectacular sky that I have ever seen. Never before have I had so many stars in a single scene. It was breathtakingly beautiful. And Will was, in that moment, the older brother familiar with it that could lead us through. We saw satellites moving across the stars, feigning their image but distinguishable. I’d never seen a satellite before. Later, a star shot across the Night, and Jesse’d never seen a shooting star before. Jesse and I were in awe of it the entire time, discussing Einstein’s Line Theory, the fabric of time, poetry, recalling lines of each other’s poems in the conversation, and I am forever grateful that Jesse was willing to drive Will back so that we could have seen what we did. And the both of us wouldn’t have been able to sleep that Night had we merely abandoned Will to the cold, fucked and floating down the river without a paddle, or even anything to grab hold of.
Despite Will’s expert directions, Jesse and I of course got lost, listening to Bauhaus and Suede, eventually working our way back on to the directions and route 80, where we were on familiar ground once more. Jesse, I think, really wants for me to fall in love with Christian Death. And I may. As he does, he recited the lyrics to me for clarification moments before Roz sang them on the speakers. Jesse is a lot older than I am (Let’s just say you can double my age and subtract four years to get his age), and he’d said earlier, drunk and at the diner, that he knows that he moves in and out of peoples’ lives, and he hoped that he’s affected me and at least taught me some things through the times that we’ve talked, or what has got to be the couple of hours we’ve spent in his car, silent, him playing musick for me that I’d either never or only heard of before. Roxy Music, Slowdive, Suede, some killer Bowie, lots and lots of Christian Death, Bauhaus, things that he was into as a young kid, that he knows I’ve never really had much exposure to or understanding of. We got off at the wrong exit on 80 after missing the ones we should have taken, so we got into Denville and rode up 46 into Dover, eventually getting to the Randolph Diner again, at 6:00 a.m., as the sun was rising. I stayed in the car for a while, listening to a couple of different songs that Jesse still wanted me to hear. And got into my car (Jesse waited to make sure that my car started) and got to my room around 6:30. I occupied myself for a bit before going to school for poetry, after which I hung out with some friends in the cafeteria, and then spent two or three hours finishing an assignment in the library before leaving it in Sander’s mailbox. I passed out almost as soon as I got home at 4 p.m., not to wake again until 9 a.m. on Saturday, to return to dreaming until 2 p.m., to start my mostly useless weekend.
And I really really didn't mean to spend these past nearly four hours in the library of CCM typing this up. Things just happen sometimes, man.