Gute Nacht (Good Night)

Ich werde euch einen Zyklus schauerlicher Lieder vorsingen. Ich bin begierig zu sehen, was ihr dazu sagt. Sie haben mich mehr angegriffen, als dies bei anderen der Fall war. Mir gefallen diese Lieder mehr als alle, und sie werden euch auch noch gefallen.
Franz Schubert

[MIDI-file]

Die Wetterfahne (The Weather-vane)

Der Wind spielt mit der Wetterfahne
Auf meines schönen Liebchens Haus.
Da dacht' ich schon in meinem Wahne,
Sie pfiff den armen Flüchtling aus.

Er hätt' es eher bemerken sollen,
Des Hauses aufgestecktes Schild,
So hätt' er nimmer suchen wollen
Im Haus ein treues Frauenbild.

Der Wind spielt drinnen mit den Herzen
Wie auf dem Dach, nur nicht so laut.
Was fragen sie nach meinen Schmerzen ?
Ihr Kind ist eine reiche Braut.












The wind plays with the weathervane
On my lovely darling's house.
And I thought in my delusion,
That it mocked the poor fugitive.

He should have noticed sooner
The symbol displayed on the house,
So he wouldn't ever have expected
To find a faithful woman within.

The wind plays with the hearts inside
As it does on the roof, only not so loudly.
Why should they care about my grief ?
Their child is a rich bride.

...by Wilhelm Muller

[MIDI-file]

Gefrorne Tränen (Frozen Tears)

I can make you out with difficulty.
What tricks the water has played all around!
We've been parted by the ice.
Now we are on different sides.

The houses and woods have grown gaunt.
A maple sways pale, emaciated.
After settling on the water, our voices
will move quietly on, with the water.

The ice floe groans and sinks in the struggle,
and you are slender, like a piece of ice far away,
and carried toward you in the river current
is a scrap of the pathway.

...by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

[MIDI-file]

Erstarrung (Numbness)

There are mountains, ask any believer,
where to wake suddenly is to risk
your life, where the spirit cold and fevered
would burn like rope in the body's fist,
so when I woke under the winter sky
last night, startled by the copper bell
of a goat above me, the way its eye
met mine I took it for a man or angel
or some such frightened thing. Like me it
darted backwards, tightening the thread
of sight between us. And so I slipped
a little farther out of sleep, my head
aching, my father mumbling where he lay,
one wakeful star above us like a blade.

...by Bruce Bond

[MIDI-file]

Der Lindenbaum (The Linden Tree)

Under der linden
an der heide,
dâ unser zweier bette was,
dâ mugt ir vinden
schône beide
gebrochen bluomen unde gras.
vor dem wald in einem tal,
tandaradei,
schône sanc diu nahtegal.









Under the lime tree
on the open field,
where we two had our bed,
you still can see
lovely both
broken flowers and grass.
On the edge of the woods in a vale,
tandaradei,
sweetly sang the nightingale.

...by Walther von der Vogelweide

[MIDI-file]

Wasserflut (Torrent)

He had not been back on Long Island for an hour when memories, triggered by sights he was seeing from a Long Island Railroad car, flooded back to him. It felt as if someone had opened a great portal. The details were a rush, a painfully uncomfortable yet irresistable torrent. He let them wash over him, netting those that drew his interest.

He studied distant hills where autumn-uniformed trees seemed ceremonial flagpoles; he was a doctor now, a specialist in ophthalmology and diseases of the eyes. But twenty years before, he had been a high school student and athlete on Long Island. Yet, in the army, he had volunteered for the Ranger Division, seeking action, learning the craft of war in one of its toughest schools.

And then had occurred the defining moment of his life. He had led a patrol, with three others under him, scouting in advance in Northern Italy. Reports had said the Germans and Italians had cleared out of the area around Spoletso. The reporters had exaggerated. Two miles from the town, his patrol had come under intense fire from a nest of snipers. Pinned down by crossfire, four men huddled behind fallen logs, considering their options. The light was still an hour from dawn, whose coming could only worsen their plight. Patches of swirling ground mist clung to the rock-strewn hillside. The charcoal-hued sky afforded poor visibility, probably saving their lives.

Of the four, Corporal John Koutensky had been grazed on the arm. Charlie Leland was anchoring the far left, and Nick Van Rimmer, his best friend and he were at the far right, fuming. "Any plans, Brains?" Nick asked.

"Somebody will have to flank those guys," he observed with a grimace.

"You bucking for a medal?"

"Working on plans to help us survive this mess," he retorted.

"Then what?" Nick said with unaccustomed gravity.

"This is no time to plan life after war, Nick!" he rasped.

"I mean it," Nick insisted. "You got any plans - if we get out of this, Ed?"

Bullets spanged off the log and the two hunched lower. "I've been thinking about that a lot, lately," Nick whispered. "This war can't last forever."

Ed laughed, bitterly. Then he nodded. "I've one idea...If we get out of this, I'll make the best use of my abilities I can, for a change. And then you know what? Twenty years from now, I'll turn up your doorstep. Whatever happens in between, that's for later. Christmas Eve. That's as far as I've gotten."

Nick grinned. "It's a date," he whispered. "Me, huh, I just hope to find the right girl, and read baseball scores in the morning paper. The rest will take care of itself. I'm not like Kelly and you. No brainy stuff for me..."

"How is that little sister of yours?" Ed asked, smiling the sound of the bullets away from them.

"You wouldn't know her. Real heartbreaker," Nick said. "She sent me a picture in the last mail. Now, exercise that mighty brain of yours and I'll show it to you, in Spoletso..."

"Deal," Ed said. "Pass the word to John and Charlie. I'm heading for those rocks, to the right. Gimme an extra grenade."

He explained his plan. Nick crawled left, to tell the others their roles. Johnny and Charlies agreed; Ed had set the plan for two minutes and counting. Ed shot a glance at Nick when he'd crawled back. Then, on the mark, he darted from behind his cover as John and Charlie opened up fire and Nick heaved a grenade at the enemy's position.

* * *

The train eased into Linden Cove station. Ed carried his suitcase, descending from the platform down cement stairs; the elevateds exit seemed steep to him. He had to walk nearly half a mile along snow-edg'd streets that had traded their sidewalks for big trees and well-kept fences.

Nick Van Rimmer's house stood on the corner of Center Lane and Woodman Street. Nick had mailed him a map, badly drawn in soft pencil on the back of what looked like a diner napkin. Reaching Woodman, Ed went up a flagstone path, climbed the cement steps and knocked on a wooden front door.

The door opened and twenty years sped by in a spate of moments; like one of those movie whip pans where everything blurs than jars, stopping...Koutensky and Leland, Johnny and Charlie, were dead, buried in Spoletso. But Ed and Nick Rimmer were embracing, as if the twenty years had never happened.

The two laughed, cried, brought up old times. They were like collectors at an exhibitors show, exchanging lives. Nick had not married, but "was looking", he said. Twenty years' correspondence, at time tough, had somehow kept their lives linked.

Then, as they examined an album of photos, the front door re-opened. Ed jumped to his feet as if a general had entered the room. A young woman - blond, self-possessed, with the most vivid eyes he had ever seen - halted. "Kelly!" Nick cried. "You made it, after all! This is the man who saved my life, Ed Hartman. Doctor Hartman now!"

"I'd know you anywhere," Kelly said. "Nick has talked about you for twenty years. Merry Christmas, Ed."

Ed flushed as much as smiled. "As he has about you. You're Kelly. You'd have to be. Merry Christmas."

"I wanted so much to meet you, all these years," she said. "I hear we're lodge brothers, too."

Ed raised an eyebrow. "Reno?"

"Uh huh," Kelly laughed. "I just got back three weeks ago. You?"

"Last year, April," he acknowledged.

She cocked her head, studying him. "You're taller than I'd expected."

"And you're as beautiful as I remembered," Ed murmured through his second blush.

"I showed him your photo, back in '45," Nick interjected. "In Spoletso. Just after he'd saved my life!"

"You remembered my photo--all this while?" Kelly wondered.

Ed nodded, gazing deep into her eyes. "Yep," he admitted. "We've, I don't know, there's a lot to talk about..."

Nick laughed at them both. Kelly let her gaze meet Ed's. "Yes, It's been a long time, hasn't it?" she murmured back.

Ed nodded. "But now...we're all home, safe and sound. Together at last." He felt another torrent hanging in the background. "Twenty years later, hell."

"Merry Christmas, OK? To us all," Nick said, watching them, feeling Johnny and Charles raising their own toast somewhere in the same background.

...by RDM Cerello & Joyce Corbett

[MIDI-file]

Auf dem Flusse (On the Stream)

After Schubert...










In the creaking pines along the river,
a doe nuzzles her spotted fawn
and grunts softly into the frozen air.
She knows the limits of language.

As you carve your name on the river
with a sharp stone, you spot antlers
sprouting downstream, as if the waters
had suddenly hardened
between the gasps of a drowning buck.
Kneeling before the rack of points,
you swipe away the snow
and see his open eyes above the ice, fixed
quick in wild panic.

His ghost stands in the tall grass of a summer field,
raising its head to hear the bleats of a lost fawn
over the distant thunder of an unnamed river:
how lonely the living must be.

...by Taylor Collier

[MIDI-file]

Rückblick (Backward Glance)

No one is seeding on the flats;
the path stopped growing,
the farmer whispers, beating the wheat
mold down with his hat.

Marriages are less, the walking
down to mere waves
from the rise of the hill.
We lost the road to the village,

we lost the will,
the words, the language
of a common dance. The mind
pulls only a single thread.

The road has nowhere to go
but through the narrowness
of needled grass
burnt to wisps of wilder.

Daily we stalk the corn,
and seeing loss, have found
the randomness of order
that stone breathes into land.

The field rolls over
to the ridge of its spine. It's easier
not to worry about creation,
to give up faith, than understand

indirection that drives a brother
lost in this hatred or that.
The farmer bows, weeding a road up
with his hands.

...by James Ragan

[MIDI-file]

Irrlicht (Will o' the wisp)

The soft snow falls on tundra soil
where dropped the leaves from the linden trees
and there on hillsides small children
rush with sleds through the Advent breeze.

Nearby others skate on hard glass ponds
laughing loudly as they tumble to and fro;
friends frolick in December's most innocent hours
pretending to be unconscious angels in the snow.

But some of us grew much too wise, apart
to chuckle and waste away our annointed time
So we moved far away from the frost of places,
beyond the mountains to a warmer valley clime

So here everyday we can toil long hours away
forever forgetting foolish moments of a past
Yet misty green eyes I find dwell in my mind
What's this image, this thought, that's been cast?

Is it me that I see with a girl hand in hand?
Is it tomorrow or days gone so far ago?
Am I remembering or make-believing of heaven;
are you real or just another angel in the snow?

...by William N. Thompson

[MIDI-file]

Frühlingstraum (Dream of Springtime)

Why do the stars seem brighter
in a winter sky,
when bare trees clench the air
like bronchi through lungs?
The cold is a song
played through a tube
of thin metal, and the wind
rushes through a bridge’s harp:
This cold repeats itself
in a trilogy of paw prints,
in tires treading your unplowed driveway,
and like your lover, who says
he needs some air,
and steps through the sliding doors
onto the deck, puffing on a cigarette,
thinking about all the ways
he fucked up.
Berries stain the snow an otherworldly
purple, and above him
is a living room—ocean sized,
black—with high-hats on a dimmer
someone’s turned
all the way up, like a new love
replacing a dying one.

...by Kristen Keckler

[MIDI-file]

Einsamkeit (Loneliness)

Inspired by Loneliness:

John Clare's 2004 improvisation, recorded at Nevada Public Radio in Las Vegas.

Die Post (The Post)

Wondering strays on highways,
Our heroins pose among thorns,
Little cling-ons.

Wash them off at the Esso
Where, like snowfall, what's
Mine is hers.

This post debriefing itches still.
What rang so true then?
Mine still hurts.

Noon dies in the post coming state,
Lies lies discontented lies,
My heart's afterstamp itches.

If this whole animal scene
Under fragments of white goes dormant,
Remind her.

...by M. Rose Hill

[MIDI-file]

Der greise Kopf (The Grey Head)

He appears
within a group of mutual friends
all milling around. The room
with white floor has no walls.
Her husband and son stand nearby.
He walks right up to her,
broad-faced, bright and sweet-
smiling as ever, beard neatly trimmed,
teeth white as snow's hope.
With no explanation of why
he’s suddenly returned from the dead,
he opens his arms, his eyes speak clearly
before his voice follows with,
“I love you,” and he embraces her.
Her startled arms encircle
his shoulders as she answers, “I love you,”
wondering how he’d managed the journey
and what others are thinking of
his inexplicable resurrection.
The simplicity of it.
She doesn’t have time to ask if he cared
about the poem she’d written – the one
about his disappearance into death.
As soon as they let go, he falls back
into the winter crowd, lost ever again
behind faces still living. Her husband,
her son – at left, at right.
One hand holding her hand,
one hand gently pressing her
shoulder. Eyes, deepest frozen lakes.
She bathes in their gazes as murmurs
envelope, her thoughts left to flounder
on snow-covered fields of waking.

...by Susan M. Botich

[MIDI-file]

Die Krähe (The Crow)

She knew that like wolves, crows had, over the years, managed to get a bad rap. Any group labeled an unkindness, a murder, a swarm or a horde had clearly managed to piss off a fair sized portion of humanity, while their cleverness had worked them into various mythologies worldwide. Of course, intelligence alone would be enough to piss off a good portion of the human race.

Native Americans have, or had, the good sense to revere them as they do wolves. Consider the Crow tribe. At least one rock group calls itself Crow. At least one dark movie hero is called Crow. Crows are so smart that they might even be an alien species, or maybe people are the alien species. Crows may even have gotten here first.

Crows serve as lookouts for wolves, leading them to prey in a fascinating symbiotic relationship. A good thing. Of course, they lack the cuddliness of wolves. She loved wolves. In short, crows are a marvelous species. On grey days, their black bodies look neat, punctuating power lines like so many clothes pins holding up nothing.

So much for the rational part.

Why then did they freak her out? She’d never been buzzed by one or threatened by one in any way. Still the idea of wings flapping around her head was enough to send her into shudders of horror. Maybe that was why she liked snakes and lizards – they couldn’t flap.

Her older sister had had a phobia about birds and managed fairly successfully to pass it on to her. She used to tuck the little one into bed, so tightly that she couldn’t move, then go to the window and scream “bat” or “bird” and run pellmell down the stairs leaving her five year old self to struggle, trying to get free from the bedclothes and run to safety. It had begun when they had seen a movie in which black birds battered themselves against the window of a western shack trying to get at those huddling inside. It was long before Hitchcock’s The Birds.

Now she sat at her dining table, looking across the room at the larger than shoebox sized package on the floor where she had inadvertently flung it when she undid the star covered silver tissue paper to discover what seemed to be a very dead crow. It had been mailed from one of the boutique mail order houses and the outside label had said Merry Christmas from Elaine. But she and Elaine had been friends for years and hadn’t had a falling out. Why would she send her a dead bird. Why would anyone send anyone a dead bird?

Cautiously, she advanced to the package, shuddering as she picked it up to examine more closely. Fortunately the damned thing didn’t seem to be animated. An information tag was tucked between the box and the paper. Her trembling fingers extracted it while she tried not to look at the bird. “Why? Why would anyone, let alone a good friend do this?”

“Meet, Edgar,” read the label. “Perch him on the back of a chair or a shelf, press the On button located between the legs to activate the mechanism, and he will say ‘Nevermore’ and move his head wisely whenever someone passes before the electric eye.”

Clearly it had been expensive, at least for Elaine who was not in good financial shape. Perhaps it was a mistake on the part of the company. The horror somewhat subsiding, she fumbled the lid back on and went to telephone.

After a few pleasantries, she said that she had received a package. “Oh, do you love it?” chirped Elaine. “I have one and just adore it.”

“I’m not certain they sent the right thing,” she responded.

“It’s supposed to be Edgar from Poe’s ‘The Raven.’ I do hope they got it right. ”

“They got it right, all right. I damned near had a heart attack. You know I hate birds close up.”

“I’m sorry, I forgot. You can return it.”

And so it turned out that it was not even a crow, but a raven. She returned it for a mortal and pestle. Nevermore.

...by Felicia Florine Campbell

[MIDI-file]

Letzte Hoffnung (Last Hope)

for Wilhelm Muller...

As if I can prevent their disintegration,
I walk through the leaves and ice,
stopping to examine each brown fragment
and reassemble the large three-pointers,
preserved, embalmed by frost.
My arms burdened with the oak’s past,
I approach.
One by one they refuse to take part in this
state of wooden torpor,
and fall aimlessly to the ground
like wetted cardboard,
unable to occupy their former beds on the branch,
to give again their life for Fall.
Break some branches from the tree
and light a small fire as night gathers,
so that I will have light
to distinguish between
the unwilling leaves,
the unresisting branches.
The standing oak is dead.

...by Edward Casey

[MIDI-file]

Im Dorfe (In the Village)

You must surely know that on this season, Christmas and New Year’s, even though it’s so fine and pleasant for all of you, I am always driven out of my peaceful cell onto a raging, lashing sea. Christmas! Holidays that have a rosy glow for me. I can hardly wait for it, I look forward to it so much. I am a better, finer man than the rest of the year, and there isn’t a single gloomy, misanthropic thought in my mind. Once again I am a boy, shouting with joy. The faces of the angels laugh to me from the gilded fretwork decorations in the shops decorated for Christmas … But after the holidays everything becomes colorless again, and the glow dies away and disappears into drab darkness.

Every year more and more flowers drop away withered, their buds eternally sealed; there is no spring sun that can bring the warmth of new life into old dried-out branches. I know this well enough, but the enemy never stops maliciously rubbing it in as the year draws to an end. I hear a mocking whisper: “Look what you have lost this year; so many worthwhile things that you’ll neveer see again. But all this makes you wiser, less tied to trivial pleasures, more serious and solid—even though you don’t enjoy yourself very much.”

Every New Year’s Eve the Devil keeps a special treat for me. He knows just the right moment to jam his claw into my heart, keeping up a fine mockery while he licks the blood that wells out. And there is always someone around to help him, just as yesterday the Justizrat came to his aid. He (the Justizrat) holds a big celebration every New Year’s Eve, and likes to give everyone something special as a New Year’s present. Only he is so clumsy and bumbling about it, for all his pains, that what was meant to give pleasure usually turns into a mess that is half slapstick and half torture.

I walked into the front hall, and the Justizrat came running to meet me … He smirked at me in a very strange way and said, “My dear friend, there’s something nice waiting for you in the next room.” …

I felt that sinking feeling in my heart. Something was wrong, I knew, and I suddenly began to feel depressed and edgy. The the doors were opened. I took up my courage and stepped forward, marched in, and among the women sitting on the sofa I saw her.

Yes, it was she. She herself. I hadn’t seen her for years, and yet in one lightning flash the happiest moments of my life came back to me, and gone was the pain that had resulted from being separated from her.

What marvellous chance brought her here? What miracle introduced her into the Justizrat’s circle? … I didn’t think of any of these questions; all I knew was that she was mine again.

I must have stood there as if halted magically in midmotion. The Justizrat kept nudging me and muttering, “Mmmm? Mmmm? How about it?”

I started to walk again, mechanically, but I saw only her, and it was all that I could do to force out, “My God, my God, it’s Julia!” I was practically at the tea table before she even noticed me, but then she stood up and said coldly, “I’m so delighted to see you here. You are looking well.” And with that she sat down again and asked the woman sitting next to her on the sofa, “Is there going to be anything interesting at the theatre the next few weeks?”

You see a miraculously beautiful flower, glowing with beauty, filling the air with scent, hinting at even more hidden beauty. You hurry over to it, but the moment that you bend down to look into its chalice, the glistening petals are pushed aside and out pops a smooth, cold, slimy, little lizard that tries to cut you down with its glare.

[… the party continues for a while…]

Julia picked up a sparking, beautifully cut goblet and offered it to me, saying, “Are you still willing to take a glass from my hand?” “Julia, Julia,” I sighed.

As I took the glass, my fingers brushed against hers, and electric sensations ran through me. I drank and drank, and it seemed to me that little flickering blue flames licked around the goblet and my lip. Then the goblet was empty, and I really don’t know myself how it happened, but I was now sitting on an ottoman in a small room lit only by an alabaster lamp, and Julia was sitting beside me, demure and innocent-looking as ever. Berger had started to play again, the andante from Mozart’s sublime E-flat Symphony, and on the swan’s wings of song my sunlike love soared high. Yes, it was Julia, Julia Herself, as pretty as an an angel and as demure; our talk a longing lament of love, more looks than words, her hand resting in mine.

“I will never let you go,” I was saying. “Your love is the spark that glows in me, kindling a higher life in art and poetry. Without you, without your love, everything is dead and lifeless. Didn’t you come here so that you could be mine forever?”

At this very moment there tottered into the room a spindle-shanked cretin, eyes bulging like a frog’s, who said, in a mixture of croak and cackle, “Where the Devil is my wife?”

Julia stood up and said to me in a distant, cold voice, “Shall we go back to the party? My husband is looking for me. You’ve been very amusing again, darling, as overemotional as ever; but you should watch how much you drink.”

The spindle-legged monkey reached for her hand and she followed him into the living room with a laugh.

“Lost forever,” I screamed aloud.

“Oh, yes; codille, darling,” bleated an animal playing ombre.

I ran out into the stormy night.

...by E.T.A. Hoffmann

[MIDI-file]

Der stürmische Morgen (The Stormy Morning)

[MIDI-file]

Täuschung (Deception)

A Memory to Schubert's TAÜSCHUNG







I.

I sit at the piano
My 21-year-old wisdom
Cuts to the hard core of the song while the teacher

Nods

Smiles

Suddenly the 19-year-old polyester baritone bumpkin
After most of a semester spent

Hitting

Missing

Travels to the heart of the song
Finally dares to walk out in the winter with me
The teacher

Plump

Satisfied

Tenured

Once knew this getting to the meaning of things

In hot August when the bumpkin first walked into the studio
How I had hated his freshman innocence against my third-year sophistication

Doesn’t know Schubert from Schoenberg does he?

Now in December he wears denim and wool
Knows Schubert is Schoenberg
Just squeezed a little differently from the same lemon
In the land where the lemon trees bloom

Knows music is just noise that’s found a place to stay.

II.

After the lesson
Walking away from the music building
Through a gray wind
His hand my hand jammed together in one jacket pocket (mine)
Brushing cheeks in the cold
Then the lock clicks behind us
Then Schubert on the record player and after that

Patsy Cline

Sinead O’Conner

Until the music and the mouth (his) that sings the words
And the hands (mine) that press the keys
All jumble together
One warmth under the blanket on a bed
Too small for one but just right for two
Till we forget whose hands are whose
Whose lips are his are mine

Melody

Harmony

Mouth

Hands

Lips

...by Wayne Lee Gay

[MIDI-file]

Der Wegweiser (The Signpost)

We crunched through a winter noon.
He carried the baby in his back pack;
I held three year old Andi’s hand,
as our snow shoes ruffled Earth
Mother’s wind-scoured coat.
We gloried in mountain lion’s tracks,
no deer in sight. Winded, we sat.
He squinted out across the lake.
The New Year ice is far too thin.
I snuggled Andi’s small neck
as she perched on my lap,
the baby faded away. So different
now. Once, we couldn’t come
to this height before July.
As we hiked down, scratchy drops
blurred my eyes. I’ve passed
this sign many eerie times, as
into the dusk I speed. The talus
slants beneath my boots. My eyes
scan over poor seared edelweiss.
No water tempts its roots; cells
sense the effort would prove nil.
This unmelted valley cowers,
a mountain-swathed chimera, hiding
out from ravens’ directionless eyes.
Yet those obsidian-dark orbs take
in the next suspended sight---old
phone poles, lines gone, waver on
across the snow-encrusted flat,
flag this encounter’s endless march
to any town that might feed our chill.

...by Elizabeth I. Riseden

[MIDI-file]

Das Wirtshaus (The Inn)

The Way that leads us on looks wide and slim;
Its roots grip tight the past; ahead, it runs
Not without turnings, till its length is done--
And we but travel, through Days' blaze, Night's
dim,
Those years we must be going... Graveyards we
pass,
The inns (with gates swung wide to greet)
invite.
Green mourning garlands and the springing vine
Mark each; and though we'll know each space, at
last,
For now, though weary, wounded, daub'd in blood,
We find the worldly wirthaus (rich) invites,
While silent zones of rest not yet excite
Our mind of purpose. Sleep cannot be good
That rounds this life we wage (as warriors
press'd)
Until our walking staff cracks, and the road
Holds naught that weigh'd to mercy's wealth seems
best...

by Robert David Michael Cerello

[MIDI-file]

Mut (Courage)

There are evil moments in every life. A false suggestion enters one's brain, and then fear is born - fear of oneself, fear for oneself. Or else a false courage - who knows? Well, call it what you like, but tell me, how many of them would deliver themselves up deliberately to perdition (as He Himself says in that book) rather than go on living secretly debased in their own eyes? How many? ... And please mark this - he was safe when he did it. It was just when he believed himself safe, and more - infinitely more -, when the possibility of being loved by that admirable girl first dawned upon him, that he discovered that his bitterest railings, the worst wickedness, the devil work of his hate and pride, could never cover up the ignominy of the existence before him. There's character in such a discovery.

...Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

[MIDI-file]

Die Nebensonnen (The Phantom Suns)

In the heresay of there and then
the winter suns set carefully
amid a forest of comfortingly large houses
lining such oddly soft steel rails.
The budget warmth and relative quiet
keeps the solstice on all the platforms,
further degrading the ocean of noise,
the Andromeda of wide screens locked
on channels like doors of an asylum
kept gloomish, smoked, and frigid
so nobody will ever touch the wasteland
so artfully maintained in alternative media.
The distance between these places
couldn’t be guessed at, whether the Mozart
performed here gets precious air time there.
This carriage’s gentle touch is remarkable.
Road rage is impossible, engineered away,
and probably banned, anyway. So, here
at the foot of another decaying wall,
where pale yellow weeds grow over burials
of sacraments and commandments,
a disturbing array of sound-effects erupt
like unwelcome bubbles belching from secret
corners of a drink falsely labeled medicinal.
The badly-finished concrete beneath
might make good as a swimming pool,
if only the hibernating tombstones
could be grown a few feet, and a moment
so brief, sudden, and withheld
of the morphine known as safety could be had.
Many lovingly forlorn virgins lose
their cherries swimming in Americana,
so maybe the pedophile deep inside
is doing the insisting. After some years,
though, the narcotic idea of ‘home’ still
hasn’t stuck. Hardly a problem, Santa says,
if some other place were on the landscape,
outside the harsh dark of ceilings
that inch closer through the night.
There are so many murmuring Nots out there
it’s hard not to imagine a wilderness named for them.
In their own language - pious, sardonic, confessive -
each of the invisible suns laugh.

...by Adam Henry Carriere

[MIDI-file]

Der Leiermann (The Organ Grinder)

An unpublished excerpt of Tales of Joan at Bard, from the final spoof,

Harry Partch and the Deadly Hockets:

Der Leiermann seht die beiden Loreleiamfernsehermensch

(The Organ Grinder who watched Gilmore Girls)

At the edge of Hollywood Bowl village near Hogwoods, Grant-Lee Phillips plays a hurdy gurdy. None of the students pay attention, jinx him, and even Serious Gerard Schwarz in canine form, barks at him. But he continues to perform, and our Harry Partch decides he too, might do well with some improv. The parallel fifths and awful quodlibets pair well with the poor online sales of Phillips, and concludes the cycle with an eerily unfinished feel perfectly in character with the lonely wandering of the musician...

Over beyond the Hollywood Bowl village
Stands an organ-grinder,
And with numb fingers
He plays as best he can.

Barefoot on the ice,
He totters here and there,
And his little plate
Is always empty.

No one listens to him,
No one notices him,
And Serious growls
Around the young man.

And he just lets it happen,
As it will,
Plays, and his hurdy-gurdy
Is never still.

Strange man,
Shall I go with you?
Will you play your organ
To my baton with a tail feather from Drumandbuglecorps's firebird, Igor?

...by John Clare

[MIDI-file]