in-accordance

my sister,

with Parkinson's and trying to lip

the words to Beyoncé's "Irreplaceable"

all while the vampire

shakes her Egyptian cabins. It's weird,

if you stare at lyrics and think

in that unspecified time, that you,

lonely in your childhood,

knew what
Dylan meant holding up signs

like souls of the same species. Or

Springsteen holding,  in his rolled up sleeves,

dreams of homogeneous rivers/ fish, wild birds plentiful.

You may as well have a turn-table, somewhat,

those ones, according to the accounts in Genesis

where Isaac and the Hebrew prophet's in Judah

ran around counting closed record shops and thinking,

2000 years from now, the last Blockbuster will

have closed and your movies will just

appear precociously in the mail,

for lack of any better ideas. But I

drove from Chicago to Dayton, the 8-track camouflaging

events, with the head of my lover in my lap and my arm

by her side, as I occasionally peeked down to see

if my toes, frozen thru on 94

had withstood the entropy.

Since radiance, hell, mist, rain, sleet,

water deposited, my lover postponing marriage,

impulsiveness, sudden rage; when fire burns the hell out

of California hills no one says "hey

when the rains come large boulders will

slide down with suddenness"  and those

of us who aren't killed immediately will read

about it and wonder, shy as we are,

that those who believe in predestination

are themselves predestined to fail.

Reviews

[jacob erin-cilberto]

i wonder about predestination considering how things seem to work out...
i like this...the prophets letting us know 2000 years ago about blockbusters closing down...

they never told us 8 tracks would be garbage, and break all the time, swallowing the tapes...

and those landslides, that as stevie nicks sang "would bring us down"---
if only we knew all this...would be smart enough to change things?

dylan and springsteen give us some pretty smart lyrics...ways of looking into ourselves and wondering 'where the hell are we?" and were are we going?

down highway 61 i guess, and we're all still Dancing in the Dark.

i am not so sure...

[RileyRedding]

Your flow is bananas. (Yes I had to sing Gwen Stefani in my head to remember how to spell that fruit, no I will not admit it if you bring it up.
So rarely can an author use unconventional word choices without just sounding plain awkward, but you do it with style and poise.
Sometimes I wonder why you don't lead a church sermon on the weekends. You could put most reverends to shame.

[W.k.kortas]

Again, what a gift it is to take small, intimate things--the wonderful opening image, the ride from Chicago to Dayton (ah, those rides with lovers...how grand they were before bucket seats)--and wind them together to create a tapestry big as a house, big as the damn universe (Beyonce and Isaac together, the mind boggles.) Something like this only looks easy.

[Ken Simm.]

This is fitting memories to our minds. sometimes memories don't fit into the thoughts quite comfortably. This is quite spectacular word usage.