Symphony #15 in A#m, op.53
Posted on | December 11, 2009 | No Comments
Symphony #15 in A#m, op.53
by Joe Yoga
i) [agitato]
It’s a Monday morning
and I have the day off from work.
I clean up the empties,
shake out the butts
smooth the ash off the table,
re-crush the cellophane
and either take a couple of deep breaths
and a spin around the block
or
light another cigarette
take the trash downstairs (or not)
and try to find that mood I’d had
and lost
that was making me swell with
the anticipation of a reckless and devastating
cry I probably need.
one long passed over.
one cashed in for sleep.
after the decision is made my
eyes and mind and my mind’s eye
settle on the problem.
See I could have been so away
If only I’d found a means.
Empty wallets mean tough choices,
Hard meditations, noisy nirvanas,
Coffee, thin shoes, and stairs.
Me and the people I love that I find it so hard to talk to…
We are not far apart here.
ii) [con affetto]
A man with an off day in a park with a hat
praying for clouds to move along
(nothing to see here)
loves, in a strange way,
fingers tapping nervously on sunglass lenses.
Way to run your chubby cracked calloused hands
through the thick grass, plump solar panel carpet
on the floor, the shell, the outside.
We spin around and keep our eyes on spires
and our toes pointed towards the horizon.
I pirouette and catch the earth tilted
laughing, rubbing, contented, snug, in stitches.
each forgiving toned leather and sticky shoes.
but:
when it rains the mud smells like horse shit.
Left here to dry, a thunderstorm becomes its own excavation.
We huddled under the stairway
our chafed palms rubbing together like they
were over burning garbage cans and everything
we knew or had had was dead,
rubbing to create the music to which we would have
our visions; our plans are as segmented as our eyes
and we flit about, from antenna to antenna,
Big dumb tree to big dumb tree to make our way around…
iii) [dolente]
Maybe we have not forgotten.
There’s a subtle evolution at work here,
humans building everything from grass to concrete to
the films to our memories of them; to the hills and
the paths and the very reality inside which we hype about.
We’re preachers of a sort, a very romantic sort of
echo chamber longing to turn itself around, or at least
be recognized as industry standard of a retro
that we, as humans ourselves,
will never forget.
I used to play with words from books but now that I have my
own shelves I find all I want to do is drown them out,
burn them, throw them away in some hyper, frenetic, and
largely out of touch expression of rage.
But now I have become attuned
To the difference between channeling rage and raging.
And posturing rage.
But that skill was honed years ago,
under belts, under blankets, sitting under the
phone on the wall waiting for people to wash dishes and
leave the damn room already, so you can get on with it
and let the damn girl off the hook, give her
back to her elevated subways and Bronx brick arches and
tenements
all gristle and weeds by the metro north tracks,
cups and shoes
See where this takes me?
See where this kind of stuff takes me?
See where this freewriting, these basic recall patterns,
this digging into soft
speckled dirt with both hands,
feeling planet and hot core trembling up,
or maybe steady underneath, waiting for me,
See where it takes me?
I remember:
we were on the concrete and earth toned platform,
walking past the shitty hollow aluminum railings,
the overgrown weed-infested parking lots.
Two kids with identical Megadeth shirts
saying one of us is going to have to change
And then just standing there,
holding a pack of marb reds with
baby fingers saying you go first
No you go first
One of them smoked because he was cooler
than the other one
The other one was on the throne in his cousin’s house
waiting for his conductor father to come home
from a day of hole punching and paper bags
and god knows what else. sadness most likely.
We could get away with not playing
as long as we hid under
the seats like beer cans,
like pornos under mattresses…
When I had that cigarette he gave me a paper plate to ash on.
If you are reading this and are fifteen, even if you are
smart, you are stupid.
So I ashed on the paper plate and rested the cig there
for a minute
as if it were an ashtray!
It burned a hole in the sheet of course,
and I was worried but he wasn’t,
Cool as always, though his father
beat him I think.
But there we were, jumping off the platform onto the
tracks. Sometimes we would go to the river
and sniff glue, sometimes we would take the train all the way
into the city, and drink 40s or Night Train and
sniff glue.
It all seems so boring now, waiting to grow up.
I remember how smart and old I felt,
and now I feel young and stupid.
I crave being told to do stuff by people I love
I need the attention of people I pay attention to.
I no longer have a lifetime ahead of me,
but I seem to have come out of that all ready and all right.
iv) [prestissimo]
Here I am, I am fifteen, I am cutting
my hand on glass, I am stubbing my toe
I am getting rocks and pebbles in my sneakers,
I am afraid of poison ivy.
I dodge weeds and never go too far up the hill,
or around that corner.
I never found what we were looking for in
the woods behind the seven-11 except a golf course
and a pretty spectacular view across a pond
of some condos in the Bronx. Maybe it was the river.
My sister lives there, with her husband, one of my “friends”
said. He probably had a wiffle bat or something.
We were all very tired. I hated it even then.
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