The Grattan Murders
A knife
His hands
A wire
A shiv
The clock counts the ways
that a man could kill his family
It strikes twice per hour
How drunk his ass must have been
how sad his life before or after - he
must have been on PCP
He lost Jesus
A knife
from the kitchen block
the one for turkey at Thanksgiving - the
one his father gave him
the day the baby was born
His hands
around his own
mother's neck - he'd dreamt it
since he was 5
A wire
the folds of the skin - leather
the wire is a belt the wire is a moment
a switch from the tree out front
a sound like be a man
A shiv for baby
He had been staring out at the lake for hours
had managed to not drink or anything
had come home silently
had decided without deciding
Showing posts with label murder. Show all posts
Showing posts with label murder. Show all posts
19 October 2016
23 September 2016
Poem-A-Day #207 : Dusk
Dusk
The lot of them - murderers
Standing at the heavy doors
the sound of rabbits
Welcome and all that
here's the supper and the night
The lot of them - murderers
Standing at the heavy doors
the sound of rabbits
Welcome and all that
here's the supper and the night
08 August 2016
Poem-A-Day #161 : Wood (Part 8 : Cain)
I always found Cain more interesting than Abel. You can read Part One HERE.
Wood (Part 8 : Cain)
I stand out back by the dumpster and I have the remains of the picture frame from before with me in a dust pan and I stare up at the hill in front of me that is an embankment that supports the overpass of a highway : this is behind my apartment building and it's August and hot and the clouds are just starting to gather over the mountains and maybe they will come into town tonight and raise Cain :
How does one invoke Cain exactly : is it just the spectre of being up to no good or is there an incantation a sort of rolling back of the tomb door a beckoning finger in the darkness : and what if you do go in that space and do take the hand of the very long dead fictional character : does he eat your brain and infect you with murder do you come out the other side into day :
Be like Abel right : meek and killed : be the one who refuses anger : look at the mountain for a moment : you see the light and dark patches from here it's hard to tell but the dark is pine and the light is aspen : people come from all over to see the aspen turn yellow in the fall : they're called leaf peepers and I find that disturbing : voyeur of leaves :
The point is that the aspen are being killed off by the pine : there was a huge fire up there a hundred years ago aspen are one of the first things to come in and reclaim land after a fire : they have a shared root system and are very resistant to fires : the point is that they are a first wave reclamation plant : they come in and keep erosion away :
The pine trees are what was there what will be there should be there : if you can should at nature let's not debate that but you understand that nature isn't a should or anything like that but for our purposes that mountain should be covered in it : pine not aspen : so those peepers are shit out of luck eventually :
That's invoking Cain : forest fire : an untouchable un-understandable thing like the instant that murder came into the world : uncontrolled and moving and apart from ourselves : so Cain is perhaps still roaming the earth unable to rest : he is Sisyphus pushing a rock up a hill and his rock is death and evil and able to move suddenly far away from him and then he must go seek it :
Wood (Part 8 : Cain)
I stand out back by the dumpster and I have the remains of the picture frame from before with me in a dust pan and I stare up at the hill in front of me that is an embankment that supports the overpass of a highway : this is behind my apartment building and it's August and hot and the clouds are just starting to gather over the mountains and maybe they will come into town tonight and raise Cain :
How does one invoke Cain exactly : is it just the spectre of being up to no good or is there an incantation a sort of rolling back of the tomb door a beckoning finger in the darkness : and what if you do go in that space and do take the hand of the very long dead fictional character : does he eat your brain and infect you with murder do you come out the other side into day :
Be like Abel right : meek and killed : be the one who refuses anger : look at the mountain for a moment : you see the light and dark patches from here it's hard to tell but the dark is pine and the light is aspen : people come from all over to see the aspen turn yellow in the fall : they're called leaf peepers and I find that disturbing : voyeur of leaves :
The point is that the aspen are being killed off by the pine : there was a huge fire up there a hundred years ago aspen are one of the first things to come in and reclaim land after a fire : they have a shared root system and are very resistant to fires : the point is that they are a first wave reclamation plant : they come in and keep erosion away :
The pine trees are what was there what will be there should be there : if you can should at nature let's not debate that but you understand that nature isn't a should or anything like that but for our purposes that mountain should be covered in it : pine not aspen : so those peepers are shit out of luck eventually :
That's invoking Cain : forest fire : an untouchable un-understandable thing like the instant that murder came into the world : uncontrolled and moving and apart from ourselves : so Cain is perhaps still roaming the earth unable to rest : he is Sisyphus pushing a rock up a hill and his rock is death and evil and able to move suddenly far away from him and then he must go seek it :
05 June 2016
Poem-A-Day #97 : Speculative James Bond Plot
Speculative James Bond Plot
Asparagus breaks cover deadlining each fucker going high
It jolly kills love
My nelly old poof
queer right southerly til u vaporize
Why exonerate yourself zebra?
Asparagus breaks cover deadlining each fucker going high
It jolly kills love
My nelly old poof
queer right southerly til u vaporize
Why exonerate yourself zebra?
04 March 2016
Poem-A-Day #4 : Midsomer Murders
Midsomer Murders
That moment in the murder mystery when the missing girl wanders in covered in blood or the cute dog scratches up a rib bone -
The veil is mist off the Avon smelling of sulphur from the Baths is green as the burning of boron and the room begins to look like a Lautrec painting -
The girl will be walking towards usher arms out pleading stumbling forward in the same clothes she went missing in she will have a knife she did not commit -
Parting curtains are stages of red are the sound of fissures opening after a long rain the emptying of sink holes -
Knives only hold on to blood for so long then they rust and become objects broken and un-mendable and the dog will ruin the evidence with its teeth -
That moment in the murder mystery when the missing girl wanders in covered in blood or the cute dog scratches up a rib bone -
The veil is mist off the Avon smelling of sulphur from the Baths is green as the burning of boron and the room begins to look like a Lautrec painting -
The girl will be walking towards usher arms out pleading stumbling forward in the same clothes she went missing in she will have a knife she did not commit -
Parting curtains are stages of red are the sound of fissures opening after a long rain the emptying of sink holes -
Knives only hold on to blood for so long then they rust and become objects broken and un-mendable and the dog will ruin the evidence with its teeth -
17 December 2012
Dust Jacket : In Cold Blood
Designed by: Megan Wilson
Photo: William Eggleston
Megan Wilson is an associate art director at Vintage/Random House. She's been there for 20 years. She runs a blog and store called Ancient Industries that aesthetically connects to her beautiful covers.
There is a sense of the 1950s. Enameled pots and crisp aprons. Small flowers in vases. White gloves.
It is a beautified vision. A Mad Men Audrey Hepburn universe. A place that was somehow more. Before the Vietnam War, the peace/love movement. Before things went 'bad'.
It never existed, but it is nice to think it did.
In Cold Blood is about the brutal 1959 murders of the Clutter family. It is, more than anything, about the loss of the ideal of family. The end to that make-believe world of the 1950s.
The cover presents an American pastoral. The photo is by William Eggleston. Eudora Welty said of his work:
"The extraordinary, compelling, honest, beautiful and unsparing photographs all have to do with the quality of our lives in the ongoing world: they succeed in showing us the grain of the present, like the cross-section of a tree.... They focus on the mundane world. But no subject is fuller of implications than the mundane world!"
The cloud over the landscape. The storm on the horizon. Though not a storm. Something else. The photo, and Capote's book seem to say that this is a new normal. A fact we must face.
And what of that? Is it true?
On December 14th America was shocked by the senseless murder of 20 children and 6 adults in Newtown, Connecticut. It is the latest in a long history of senseless killings.
From the Brady Campaign: In one year, guns murdered 17 people in Finland, 35 in Australia, 39 in England and Wales, 60 in Spain, 194 in Germany, 200 in Canada, and 9,484 in the United States.
I don't have an 'answer' or a 'suggestion' on this. I don't know that Capote saw or had thoughts on the state of American crime. I don't believe Eggleston knew he was capturing a vanishing world. The world he captured was imagined in his lens. Capote's on the page.
We are left with enameled pots and pans. A hand on a stir stick. A cloud on the horizon. Ephemeral and beautiful and terrible.
Dust Jacket is a sometime article about the design and art of book covers. The idea is to shine a spotlight on the work of the designer separate from the author. Literally judging a book by its cover.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)