Silver Jews (as lead by David Berman) - “Suffering Jukebox”
Suffering Jukebox
Cranes on the downtown skyline is a sight to see for some
it ought to make a few reputations in the cult of number one
while these seconds turn these minutes into hours of the day
while these doubles drive the dollars and the light of day away
suffering jukebox such a sad machine
you’re all filled up with what other people mean
and they never seem to turn you up loud
got a lot of chatterboxes in this crowd
suffering jukebox in a happy town
you’re over in the corner breakin’ down
they always seem to keep you way down low
the people in this town don’t want to know
well I guess all that mad misery must make it seem to true to you
but money lights your world up, you’re trapped what can you do?
you got Tennessee tendencies and chemical dependancies
you make the same old jokes and malaprops on cue
suffering jukebox such a sad machine
you’re all filled up with what other people mean
hardship, damnation and guilt
make you wonder why you were even built
suffering jukebox in a happy town
you’re over in the corner breaking down
they always seem to keep you way down low
the people in this town don’t want to know
Jack Kerouac reading “The Bowery Blues” with Steve Allen on piano accompaniment
The Bowery Blues
For I
Prophesy
That the night
Will be bright
With the gold
Of old
In the inn
Within.
Cooper Union Cafeteria—late cold March afternoon, the street (Third Avenue) is cobbled, cold, desolate with trolley tracks—Some guy on the corner is waving his hand down No-ing someone emphatically and out of sight behind a black and white pillar, cold clowns in the moment of horror of the world—A Porto Rican kid with a green stick, stooping to bat the sidewalk but changing his mind and halting on—Two new small trucks parked—The withery gray rose stone building across the street with its rime heights in the quiet winter sky, inside are quiet workers by neon entablatures practicing fanning lessons with the murderous Marbo—A yakking blonde with awful wide smile is making her mouth lip talk to an old Bodhisattva papa on the sidewalk, the tense quickness of her hard working words—Meanwhile a funny bum with no sense tries to panhandle them and is waved away stumbling, he doesnt care about society women embarrassed with paper bags on sidewalks—Unutterably sad the broken winter shattered face of a man passing in the bleak ripple—Followed by a Russian boxer with an expression of Baltic lostness, something grim and Slavic and so helplessly beyond my conditional ken or ability to evaluate and believe that I shudder as at the touch of cold stone to think of him, the sickened old awfulness of it like slats of wood wall in an old brewery truck
Shin McOntario with
no money, no bets, no
health, palls on by
pawing his inside coat
no hope of ever
seeing Miama again
since he lost his pickles
on Orchard Street
and his father
S t u h t e l f e d e h r e d
him to hospitals
Of gray
bleak
bone
drying
in the moon
that mortifies his coat
and words sing
what mind
brings
Bleeding bloody seamen
Of Indian England
Battering in coats
Of Third Ave noo
With no sense and their brows
Streaked with sine sop
Blood of ogligit
Sad adventurers
Far from the pipe
Of Liverpool
The bean of bone
Bottle Liffey brown
Far hung unseen
Top tippers
Of ocean wave.
God bless & sing for them
As I can not
Cooper Union Blues,
The Musak is too Sod.
The gayety of grave
Candidates makes
My gut weep
And my brains
Are awash
Down the side of the
blue orange table
As little sneery snirfling
Porto Rican hero
Bats by booming
His coat pocket
Fisting to the Vicinity
Where Mortuary
Waits for bait.
(What kind of service
Do broken barrels give?)
O have pity
Bodhisattva
Of Intellectual
Radiance!
Save the world from her eyebrows
Of beautiful illusion
Hope, O hope,
O Nope, O pope
Galway Kinnell’s “First Song” as rendered by musician Andrew Bird [live on WMFU New York, 8/24/03]
First Song
Then it was dusk in Illinois, the small boy
After an afternoon of carting dung
Hung on the rail fence, a sapped thing
Weary to crying. Dark was growing tall
And he began to hear the pond frogs all
Calling on his ear with what seemed their joy.
Soon their sound was pleasant for a boy
Listening in the smoky dusk and the nightfall
Of Illinois, and from the fields two small
Boys came bearing cornstalk violins
And they rubbed the cornstalk bows with resins
And the three sat there scraping of their joy.
It was now fine music the frogs and the boys
Did in the towering Illinois twilight make
And into dark in spite of a shoulder’s ache
A boy’s hunched body loved out of a stalk
The first song of his happiness, and the song woke
His heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy.
The Fly
Little Fly,
Thy summer’s play
My thoughtless hand
Has brushed away.
Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?
For I dance
And drink, and sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.
If thought is life
And strength and breath
And the want
Of thought is death;
Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live,
Or if I die.
Her
There is no noisier place than the suburbs,
someone once said to me
as we were walking along a fairway,
and every day is delighted to offer fresh evidence:
the chainsaw, the leaf-blower blowing
one leaf around an enormous house with columns,
on Mondays and Thursdays the garbage truck
equipped with air brakes, reverse beeper, and merciless grinder.
There’s dogs, hammers, backhoes
or serious earthmovers if today is not your day.
How can the birds get a peep
or a chirp in edgewise, I would like to know?
But this morning is different,
only a soft clicking sound
and the low talk of two workmen working
on the house next door, laying tile I am guessing.
Otherwise, all quiet for a change,
just the clicking of tiles being handled
and their talking back and forth in Spanish
then one of them asking in English
“What was her name?” and the silence of the other.
A Regret
Kurt, early
twenties. Met
him after
an AA
meeting in
Silverlake
(November,
eighty-five).
I remem-
ber standing
with him up-
stairs, in the
clubhouse, how
I checked his
body out.
But not who
approached whom.
Or what we
talked about
before we
leaned against
my car and
kissed, under
that tarnished
L.A. moon.
Drove to my
place and un-
dressed him in
the dark. He
was smaller
than me. I
couldn’t keep
my hands off
his ass. Next
morning, smoked
till he woke,
took him back.
He thanked me
sweetly. I
couldn’t have
said what I
wanted, though
must have known.
Drove home and
put him in
a poem
(“November”)
I was at
the end of.
Later that
day it rained
(I know from
the poem).
November Night
Listen…
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost crisp’d, break from the trees
And fall.
Home
I didn’t know I was grateful
for such late-autumn
bent-up cornfields
yellow in the after-harvest
sun before the
cold plow turns it all over
into never.
I didn’t know
I would enter this music
that translates the world
back into dirt fields
that have always called to me
as if I were a thing
come from the dirt,
like a tuber,
or like a needful boy. End
Lonely days, I believe. End the exiled
and unraveling strangeness.
[Sonnet] name address date
name address date
I cannot remember
an eye for an eye
then and there my
this is
your se
cond ch
ance to
h i s t o r y
r e p e a t s
i t s s e l f
and a tooth
for a tooth
is a tooth:
Mr. T—
A man made of scrap muscle & the steam
engine’s imagination, white feathers
flapping in each lobe for the skull’s migration,
shoud the need arise. Sometimes drugged
& duffled (by white men) in a cockpit
bound for the next adventure. And liable
to crush a fool’s face like newsprint; headlines
of Hollywood blood and wincing. Half Step ‘N Fetchit,
half John Henry. What were we, the skinny B-boys,
to learn from him? How to hulk through Chicago
in a hedgegrow afro, an ox-grunt kicking dust
behind the teeth; those eighteen glammering
gold chains around the throat of pity,
that fat hollow medallion like the sun on a leash—
Freedom
My two dogs
tied to a tree
by a ten-foot leash
kept whining and howling for an hour
till I let them off.
Now they are lying quietly on the grass
a few feet further from the tree
and they haven’t moved since I let them go.
Freedom may be
only an idea
but it’s a matter of principle
even to a dog.
Do Not Pick Up the Telephone
That plastic Buddha jars out a Karate screech
Before the soft words with their spores
The cosmic breath of the gravestone
Death invented the phone it looks like the altar of death
Do not worship the telephone
It drags its worshippers into actual graves
With a variety of devices, through a variety of disguised voices
Sit godless when you hear the religious wail of the telephone
Panties are hotting up their circle for somebody to burn in
Nipples are evangelizing bringing a sword or at least a razor
Cunt is proclaiming heaven on earth i.e. death to the infidel
Do not think your house is a hideout it is a telephone
Do not think you walk on your own road, you walk down a telephone
Do not think you sleep in the hand of God you sleep in the mouthpiece of a telephone
Do not think your future is yours it waits upon a telephone
Do not think your thoughts are your own thoughts they are the toys of the telephone
Do not think these days are days they are the sacrificial priests of the telephone
The secret police of the telephone
O phone get out of my house
You are a bad god
Go and whisper on some other pillow
Do not lift your snake head in my house
Do not bite any more beautiful people
You plastic crab
Why is your oracle always the same in the end?
What rake off for you from the cemeteries?
Your silences are bad
When you are needed, dumb with the malice of the clairvoyant insane
The stars whisper together in your breathing
World’s emptiness oceans in your mouthpiece
Stupidly your string dangles into the abysses
Plastic you are then stone a broken box of letters
And you cannot utter
Lies or truth, only the evil one
Makes you tremble with sudden appetite to see somebody undone
Blackening electrical connections
To where death bleaches its crystals
You swell and you writhe
You open your Buddha gape
You screech at the root of the house
Do not pick up the detonator of the telephone
A flame from the last day will come lashing out from the telephone
A dead body will fall out of the telephone
Do not pick up the telephone
