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1. |
Sleepwalking
02:33
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Shadow of your hand across my wrist’s
Enough to turn me from that to this
Is all it takes to alter my steps
Leave me alone in my sleepwalking
My feet are lead, my arms outstretched
Fingers first is how I tread—
I’m all touch—
Leave me alone in my sleepwalking
Except that I hear air crush
As I enter into this room of wool
And sense a transposition from heat to cool… warmth
Up the fibers climbs, I press
And it’s your chest I find
My hands wander: where’s the heart?
Leave me alone in my sleepwalking
Then all in one rushing gasp: your breath yet
Faint as spider arms or lash-fine antennae
Of a wasp
Leave me alone in my sleepwalking
It’s both wrists you’ve got me by
Now with a grip like a predator
On spinal arcs of two limp mice
And we rise
Leave me alone in my sleepwalking
And on those two split screens behind the lids
One vision that was hidden from me exposes
Itself in this black blinding-ness:
It’s you…returned…as if you hadn’t left
The cover upturned, right here next to me
In this bed sleeping, where I sleep too
Dreaming of walking out and meeting you, please
Leave me alone
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2. |
Safe House
01:56
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When peace arrives
Smuggled here by a shadow
I wonder who will be left in the house
To open the door when the soft knock rattles the window
And words are exchanged
In tones so low
No one could possibly know
The way parents seem to a child
In the room down below
Language melted, the space between syllables wide and whiter than snow
When peace arrives
And there is no home
And no windows to peer in
On tiptoe
And no curtains to see through to shadows
And the shadow has gone
And in the old barn
On the edge of the lawn barely visible
Another door is open
And leads to a room so dark
Its borders seem to pulse
Peace will know it has arrived
And that this is a house
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3. |
Fragment 1
02:09
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4. |
Gospel
02:23
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The gospel of silence hangs in the air
Waiting to be preached
The priest with bandaged hands
Pantomimes it
And it gives itself to him fully
Sculpted and pressed
By the lateral pass and swept
Exclamations of gauze
The priest has been reading the book
The book with pages of steel wool
With its iron covers open
Face down on his lap
He has fallen asleep
And passed his hand up and back
Dreaming of lovers
The gospel of silence curled
In the corner of the room
Where it was late and the fire knew it
It watched the priest
Moan and undulate
And the streaked crimson
Of his fingers mingle
With white powder
Of his ejaculate
It went to him and offered itself
Its teaches a lesson of earthly love
The priest half heard
And forgot
And on Sunday
With bandaged hands conveyed
To a congregation
Of somnambulists
Shuffling over the graves
Of unborn children
Holding logs for the fire
Of streaked red wood
This silence
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5. |
King Sailor
01:50
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In the vestibules of the crypts of New Orleans
The spirits mill about
Consulting the swirls of marble
Like the scrolls
Of petrified smartphones
The soot of King Sailor enters their nostrils
His bier of ultramarine
And gold-green mind’s eyes of peacock fronds
Was doused with gasoline
And spun out a back-orange clouds
Carrying news of springs
And then they can breathe
And the drum calls them back
To dance in human skin
The feeling of sinking the mass
Of abdomens
Between spread legs
The eon-creating position
Of squatting, then shelving in and pulling away
Once I held the cradle of a pelvis
Up to rain, says one
As his eyes flutter shut
Just as though this saying
Were enough to stir the rhythm of the name of his beloved
I recall the chilled lines of water
Hugging the insides of my arms
My thrilled skin
And flooded the traffic circles of my chest
And me a tiny sailor in a small boat drifting in and out
The prow of my dory poking
The black rooms of shadows cast from roots
Dangling from the banks of so many ovals
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6. |
Fragment 2
02:10
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7. |
Lost Room
03:34
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The emir had become preoccupied with birds
Sparrows threading the morning air and the vista between
The columns in the outside porches
The shadows of buntings
Undulating across colonnades
Such that the room at the back of the Alhambra
Decided it was time
It had been for some while transfixed
By the fragments of the singers
And guitar strains drifting in
From the gypsy caverns at night
And so slowly, over seasons
Worked its way free of the palace structure
Hairline cracks in the marbles at first
Then gaps into you which you could sink a finger, then two, then a fist
While the emir watched the birds and walked in his sleep
And the four lions pulling in the compass directions
Held up the waters of all the earth
Mythically in the basin on their backs
Then by the light of the moon
The room was suddenly, appallingly seen
Halfway up the hill
Perched somehow on the south slope
And a messenger was about to enter the bedchamber of the emir
With a warning whose wax seal had already been broken
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8. |
Witness of Miro
01:36
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Peace buried the town face up
The rose window of its cathedral on top
Staring up into the earth
Like a pulsing stone pupil
The stained-glass shards dropped away
Over time leaving caverns that became
Shafts of wells
Into which they fell
The glasses returned to sand
And the sand to its origins
Of newborn rocks
The rocks rolled backward on the waves
And the sea filled
With Protozoans
Each bearing the witness of Joan Miro
The fires of pre-Cambrian forges burned
So that in the heart of the cathedral
Was always the memory of flames
And molten words
Before they formed the gospel
And ridges of the swirls of the cyclops
Which blinked once or several times
When it was shot
Before its colors frosted over and grayed
Long enough to see Peace’s face
Like a moon just above the dirt
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9. |
Herd
02:18
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The hunter asleep
In the skull of Descartes
Awakes from his bed of sand
Light paints the cracks in the ceiling
Of the fused bones in the pantheon
And in one side of the dome
Cool shadows lurk
In which red marks
Smeared with the juice of crushed currants
Tell the story of a herd
Of pigs, crushed shells
The inside of which
Are the glazed memories
Of equations that construct
Bi-valves, make a sound
Like rattles under his feet
And with one arm braced
Against Descartes inner brow
He urinates through
The philosopher’s socket
He yawns
He has slept through
The Information Age
And without knowing it
Survived the plague of fiction
That contaminated the data
And brought the world’s cities to ruin
The first to go were the virtual ones
Though curiously these left
Physical traces: dents, imprints
Crenellations not dissimilar
To those his body, pressed into sand for eons, deposited
Lava’s dirty orange river flowed in
And his form was cast into an icon
His work has too survived and he realizes now
Seeing it separated by light years
How little resemblance the image bears to anything that was
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10. |
Fragment 3
02:15
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11. |
Ear of the King
01:13
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A key is being passed around a garden party
Covertly from hand to hand
One by one
In groups of twos
The guest are disappearing
To an upper room
On the thickly carpeted stairs
You can barely hear their steps
In fact their feet never touch
As with their toes dangling
They spin upward
Thumping the lips
And banging on the landings
The door opens
The room is lit
With locked hands
Their arms swaying slowly
The sisters sing
Their voices drain
And one bends down
to whisper something
Into the ear of the sleeping king
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12. |
Hourloupe
Hourloupe: “I associate it, by assonance, to ‘hurler’ (to roar), to ‘huleler’ (to hoot), to ‘loup’
(wolf).”
—Jean Dubuffet
Hourloupe is a collaboration between writer, musician, and artist Frank Menchaca and Anar Badalov.
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