Distant drumming, distant rapping on wood, pounding. Glass and metal shaking, encased in wood, peering from far away, hearing from far away, remote viewing into a world, listening to hammering, drumming, the codes of longing. I am trying to make out the code, looking for a pattern, and I see him; Murray M. “Buddy” Harman Jr., laying the drum tracks for Roy Orbison’s In Dreams. As soon as I land in the dead’s house they begin to tear it down, replace the windows and doors, cover over steel with gold, make it shine so the next viewer is snared by beauty. This longing, this bait, it doesn’t work on me, I have taken the antidote.
*
For a moment a candle flame of Mother Fire pulses into the darkness of Old Louisville morning, pulsing, accepting the ghastly speter of being, half alive, half ensnared, longing for freedom. There are ten thousand minds reaching out ot me all at once, heaving with my true name, heaving with meories, with an elixir for freedom. If I I can become the oak tree I can hold this sky up, if not it will crash down again in three more breaths. There is no way, I can’t do it alone, let’s die again.
*
You slip into this place, into this park at midnight, next to a haunted railroad track, just to fuck in the backseat of a sedan, tumbling in American night, her underworld on repeat, the rhythm of her skull banging into the door.
*
Distant drumming, talking drums attempt to awaken the viewer, but he peers into the mute underworld. There is no voice here, this is the wrong place, this is the place of binding.
*
You believe in a person so you can put them on and move into a new world. Your faith in them is necessary, just for a moment, whether they believe in you or not. You do this with place names as well, and with spaces of time to make a narrative for a nursery rhyme so you can lull them to sleep. When they sleep you change the cards, take all the aces, replace them with princes.
*
But what is true is you view from far away from another place, you peer into youth, you peer out of old age, you move through the door of a person you believe in to make them real so they become a tunnel for your destiny.
*
Here, I am spider in the web of Persephone, I bind weaker minds into Her will, they swing around in pleasure, they line up to do it, and we make them die. Pounding as they build the next building for her web, for their beds, for the basements silence, because there is no voice in the underworld.
*
We are all familiar with the Stealer of Voices but what Spirit returns the voice? And when it returns, is it new or is the person replaced, is the vehicle new, and its genius? I am looking for my friends voice, must I snatch it from the butcher who took it, or is there a reserve of voice? A river buried, a vein of mercury bubbling like a spring?
*
I think you know the answer, and you can feel it bubbling.
*
If I tap right here on these three points the river will rise, the waters will rise, the whale will peer out of the deep, the voice will return. Here is a flame, here is a rain, here is a thunder, l’Il shake the cats out of the tree. Just to hear her voice again, but we need a new world, a new person to be a door.
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