gabriel-if-you-must

[gabriel-if-you-must]

Bielobog

It is a brazen thing

To be good

It is to present cigarette burns to the sky on a canvas of pale skin

And to implore the devils of the long shining road

To do as they will with the marks

But like the army surgeon with shaking hand and consistent fist

It is in many ways more virtuous

I feel

To be good half of the year

If you had caught me but earlier

In the now dead spring

I would have helped you

But the grain is gone and the children have starved

And as such in the lean months

I am much darker and my colour has elapsed

This is of value and this of constancy

When the birds watch you from the trees

On your staggered and drunk walk home

They will be vultures or they will be blackbirds

 And when the winds pour down from avenues cold and wet

They will be hurricanes or they will spread your seeds

And when I knock on your homestead

With your husband out

Still tilling the land

I will be dark or I will be light

I am going to let the seasons be defined by alternating movements

I have decided

I am going to let the gathering months to be defined

By me

I have decided

By my filial piety and my evergrowing rage

In my harshness and prosperity

In sickness and in health

In my pouring summer and your exhausting winter

I will be here to present both arguments

[gabriel-if-you-must]

All the Men of St Thomas

And yeah sure

In these great carrier bags of my childhood

You’ll find the cold liquid.

And the bittered lukewarm tea

Of words left unsaid

And I have bled and I have begun again

I have washed myself in the rivers of my youth

And I am

Ready to continue

a child is born

he is small and sickly

and hates the smell of fumes 

outside the hospital he finds himself in

he does not squawl when carried

rocked or dropped

or when warm concrete is poured down his open mouth

he is a beautiful thing

and he will be destroyed 

in the course of his creation

life gets bigger 

a path is a tunnelled to a tenement building

combustion engines rumble unhappily 

slouching as they do

with the parasitic rust 

the child feels the lizards of decay 

climb over his pink skin and cries

he learns pain before hunger, company and cold

and thus latches onto it

as a second mother

curiosity leads him to the embrace 

of boiling water 

fat fingers latch around a saucepan

grateful that gravity 

should herald such black bliss

he lay face down 

unable to drown in a place without sunlight 

for many months 

he was only saved by a passing witch

who sucked his wound and emptied his lungs

he would never forgive what this woman

and those like her

had done to separate him from the divine feminine

that would form his phantom limb

the child has taken his first steps

he learns speech, truth and balance

in the cemetery 

next to his house

he grows an affinity for the cold

and develops an easy conversation with the dead 

the gristly talk lying between children

is entirely within his grasp

yet it is only in the stolid crypts and mausoleums 

that he finds serenity

he is taken for interrogation 

sporadically 

when the red liquid has fallen from him 

once more

and he has not cleaned it up in time 

harsh dawn cuts at his eyes 

brighter than that which the human within him can stand

even though

it must be noted for posterity

he does not cry

the demon surgeon at work 

chuckling slightly with the breathy heave ho of his gentle shoulders

chivvies out another tooth 

with analytical poise 

he would later use gold to replace what was no longer there

and never feel worthy of it

he had learnt how to grasp pain from a masculine source

and would not relinquish the skill

in the years that would follow

 

he grew good with machines

he toys and he tinkers with nuts and bolts

he makes little green men 

that blow soft pufts of oily gas 

whirring approximations of dogs and cats 

to accompany him

when the noise is too much

to be alone

he makes dead babysitters too 

that lie in the family garage 

a tarpaulin over their bodies

jackdaws fly over his head on sundays 

he watches the drones eat the jackdaws 

and the planes eat the drones 

he is as small and defenceless 

as the magpies that cower in the heaventowers above

but praise god

he is not eaten

instead he grows an appetite 

and an ambition

to be an airport oneday

to write from a position of power

to open his mouth 

and let jet engines soar out

to live strong, long and well

to be an airport

he crushes ants

he delights at ending life with a flick of a wrist

he climbs into trees

enacts genocide 

and leaves

the termites that survive 

follow him 

they crawl into his shoe and he takes them home

they hatch broods which hatch colonies

until a new species 

lives in his shoe

the hatchlings hear stories from their fathers of sad diaspora

and plot revenge 

while the plump child soundly sleeps

they climb into his ear

and build mounds of confusion and communication

a towering Babel worn in shimmering facade

that will carry severe repercussions

as I continue on with this story

[gabriel-if-you-must]

The Manifesto of Suicide Sarah

And yeah

Underneath freezing water all my life

Taken across the various stations of the cross

Enacted upon my skin

[gabriel-if-you-must]

[gabriel-if-you-must]

Jeremiah Greene

Jeremiah Greene died recently. I saw he had been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer a few days ago and then the next time I saw his name he had died. He was and is my favourite drummer of all time. I’m going to try and collect how his passing has made me feel in this entry.

I’ve recently turned 22. I can’t help but be insincere. I can’t be elegiac or write paeans. I can’t play the drums. I don’t have an entrance to death or to music at the moment. I can only try and write what I feel. I discovered this band before I had finished high school. When Jeremiah finished high school he and his friends headed in a van to cross the country playing music from their first album. They’d write the Lonesome Crowded West, one of my favourite albums of all time, while on that trip. I’ve always loved the album even before I knew it in its entirety. It was a world of truck drivers, caravan parks, alcoholism and being the only kid in school that cared. They were concepts I had currency in and it was a vocabulary I already had utterances in.

So I’m older and younger than him and still young. Yeah.

I’m always reminded of motion by Modest Mouse. Cars and highways and shrubland overlooked by passing front lights and the sort of motion my great-grandfather knew nothing about. I don’t drive ; I can’t drive. I do my best on buses and skiffs passing industrial dockyards to lay claim to that sort of motion. I think it’s restlessness and Jeremiah always displayed it the best. There was an insistence I heard in his drumming. To never be tired and to never be weak. To pledge allegiance to horsepower and slip roads. Isaac’s lyrics described to me a childhood that never existed and Jeremiah’s drumming told me about the escape from it. Never falter if you can help it. Never be cruel or cowardly.

Jeremiah said his inspiration from drumming came from the songs of the band Fugazi, which I disagree. (you see what I meant about insincerity?) Fugazi always seemed as if they project outward to me. A noise that cancels out the noise that could exist in its space simply by its existence. Early Modest Mouse never felt that way. There’s a part of one of the Dark Tower books by Stephen King where the protagonists encounter a bear automaton that has spent thousands of years being harried, scratched and bitten by mechanical flies until it’s all the way to insane. I can approach the music of a wounded animal ; I know what it sounds like. The drumming of modest mouse sounded to me like the glumness of a skin infection. A misery that can’t have the weeks lost in it be justified many years later.

 To me, Modest Mouse would construct and tinker with these delicate machines and then take them down again. Sometimes there would be moments of eruption and other times just minutes of fading into stillness. You can see it on the last tracks of their best albums ; The Lonesome Crowded West and the Moon & Antarctica. On What People are made of, on the latter, the vocalist howls out an answer to the premise of the song title. They ain’t made of nothing but water and shit!

And there’s a call. There’s a big cry. Sic em Dog. And Jeremiah’s drums really explode. It sounds like he’s banging on the hull of a huge cargo freighter by the end. This loud, ferocious drumming to scare the inhabitants of the Island of Doctor Moreau. It doesn’t feel like a battle cry. Like a last warning before darkness. Before the fuel tanks fill and the radiation chambers disperse. Whatever. A final drum roll and then silence.

On It’s All On Ice, Alright, the second half of the closing track of the Lonesome Crowded West, the band give over almost 2 minutes just to Jeremiah and his kit. The album has plenty of long songs that spill over and continue far beyond the chorus and verse expected of such a performance but it’s never just one voice in the foreground. Jeremiah goes and doesn’t shut up. You’re exhausted if you try and keep up.

There’s a breathless quality to it all and then a slow sense of completion. There’s no more speed or gristle or glory. There’s silence once you’re done speaking. And I'm done speaking. I'm done trying to convert all that water and shit into a lasting and authoritative contribution.

R.I.P Jeremiah. You will be missed.

[gabriel-if-you-must]

Sadness is a small room

Sadness is a small room

Where amphibians play by your feet

Tall men with era appropriate clothing make handshakes and deals

Filling the room with smoke from their open mouths

Full of crooked death

You splutter in your sleep

As sadness is a small room

And there is nowhere for the smoke to go

Sadness is a small room

With subrooms

And antechambers

The growth of the mushrooms through the carpet 

Is the only indication of movement

As empty corridors snarl and shout at each other

I am grateful for the mushrooms

As proof that time has not given up on me

I merely wish

That they would not grow upon my body as they do

Sadness is a small room

It is permanent dystrophy 

And it is exhausting to age

The fields of ague of my youth

Are shorn as we speak

That alien corn is irradiated outside my room

Strange vegetables have grown 

And the faerie have withdrawn

Withered and beaten

So I stay in my room

Sadness is a small room

With thin walls 

Easily permeated

By noise and moisture

I hear everything in my small room

Wrapped as I am in red gristle

The neighbors fight

I take notes

Hoping to adopt their parlance and posture

When my mother returns 

But she strongarms me to silence

And to obedience 

Upon her arrival

In my small room

Sadness is a small room

One of thousands in a rickety tower

Built after the war

With asbestos in the walls

And cardboard in the floors

The council send people round to tear it down

But I do not let them in here

In my small room

Sometimes I put my foot right through

And fall into the room below

Use my claws and teeth unto myself

To become the sole inhabitant

Of the dwelling below

There cannot be two in here

It is only a small room 

After all

And nobody rises

Sadness is a small room

Where I have made myself another cold cup of tea

And hoped

That soon someone will arrive 

To devour me