Housekeeping

• This is the concert program, right on your phone!
• If you aren’t sure of what this is, you’ll find out soon enough.
• Please…
  • Try to keep your phone brightness low
  • Feel free to take pictures and videos (and maybe send them to Abe later)
  • Tip your bartender

Lineup

Abe Brownell – Poems, lap steel, director

MK Titiati – Drums, first mate

Rachel Shurland – Vocals

Vaughn Samuels – Vocals

Sebastian Franjou – Guitar, bass

Phill Grannan – Guitar, bass

Christopher Carlos Montejo – Latin percussion

Jacob Hiser – Piano, keys

Mabel Pence – Piano, keys

Nick Hill – Trumpet

Poems

Collision in Three Sittings

A halting stuttering way to be
Stopping and noticing too much
In this thick and clouded medium
It’s easy to be non-specific
Abstraction doesn’t grip
One must first scrape the pen along the page
To draw a story out

Can I write fast enough or does writing slow it down?
The windowsill is dirty
I have needed to clean my room for most of my life
Sometimes the noise will set you free
Sometimes you spill ink all over it
A chaos of words and an act of communion
One with connections, for better or worse
A colliding of words into sentences
The only sure thing is their presence in the media we breathe
And a choice to think this or that
(This is how to become specific)

Only the writing is manual
Try not to think about it too much
This stirs non-thoughts
Very little friction of their own
Let them fall away
Let the leftovers hum and radiate
Think good
And slow

Craft the operations, sculpt them
Sand falling all this time
Running light now
Or it did the last time I traced over that line
This is elapsing
Soon I will continue off the page
Human after all
Bearing hunger as the standard
The sine qua non of artistic achievement
Gasping for air
Stumbling for light
None of it will lead you out
You are free to be terrified
Thirst as an anchor
Anchor as release

Here the traces of my last traces stop
Somehow the noise will set you free
Scratch its traces along the page
The windowsill remains dirty
I predict I will need to clean my room for many years to come
Rebirth traces over your karma
Make it good
Be specific
Drag it out across the pages
Make it legible and known
Write it in between things
O venerable word,

Collide!

Sunny

I came down on a sunny day
You came down with me
All kinds of problems now
Coming out any way

I came down on a sunny day
You came down with me
Woke up in a cloudy way
Wasn’t alright to see

I came down on a sunny day
You came down with me
Couldn’t stand it any more
Couldn’t just let it be

I come up like the gravity’s off
I come up to breathe
Floating up where the night is soft
Stuck right where I’ve got to be free

I came down on a sunny day
You came down with me
Name’s been written inside my throat
Under my memory

Friction Free

Dreams frictionless, incomprehensible, and complete
A slow glide into big sleep
Doorman swallows the key
All the pins tumble into place
Open skull to sky
You’re just dying to erase
I stake it all on the heaps
All round the sidewalks and streets
Grand ledger of what used to be
Now eat!

Transfigure desire to meat
Offer yourself to the gods within
They slip between your senses
Swallowing the key
All the pins tumble into place
They slip into your senses
Tumble them into place
The pins are all desires
The core turns round your face
All teeth; brass cylinders in brass cylinders
And nothing awaits a key
Now eat!

And I repeat!

Slow Cinema

Underside the stain | on the inward surface
I let the silences | expand
Fill the empty | spaces | among my organs
Where they need to be
I go out | and walk | to digest it
See the disturbances | in the air | bending light
Bending in knots | around the axons
Tie them off | to a later date
Fire them | out of the projection room
Photons and disarray
Inward manufacture | of mirror image
Wafting off | the silver screen
Continuous luminescent birth | of you
Soft landing | out of abstraction
Specific | to that smoke in the light
Still there | in a dark room
No longer hungry | for a version of you
Withdraw the exact figure | of all the frames in sequence
Sound it out | of the beauty
Rolling cascade | of celluloid
Wash yourself | away
Reenter as | the credits roll
Hear the birds | again | and know what time it is
Stretch and shuffle | back to the surface
Break down | the stillness
Go out | and walk | to digest it
Let the feet carry you | out into the night
Pouring rain and | return home
Settle your shadows
Another dream

Single State Operator

It’s all in one state
Can’t keep anything else | until the gravity arrives
Orthodoxy is bent by that
The gravity you hold right behind your eyelids
Thumping up and down | you keep noticing
The earth axis ain’t straight | hasn’t been for a minute

You can’t stand
Up and orthogonal to that planet
Can’t wander that vector forever
Either it winds up and down the clock
Burning that midnight oil til the rocks melt
And here we are at | the heat death of the universe
Some electrons left over
All these odd angles | thank God they aren’t right
I could see myself running away
Sudden and abrupt
Selling it all and wandering off | existential interrupt
Recast the present on repeat
To stop it all from rushing in
Straight ahead

To open floodgates | allow the rush
This is the way to capture the beat

One of the same thing can become two
If hung on long enough | to upset the rhythm
Endemic to real numbers | of real things raining down
Fragments of frail instantiation
The dust is taking over | the smell of apples hangs in the air
Stale tobacco | hangs with it too
Serves the end of cell turnover | we’re living longer now
Long enough to get cancer and even more lonely

Dear Xiaole,
I couldn’t describe to you all that streams in
From this place of few dimensions
Utterly ineffable | lacking multitudes of possibilities
Only straight ahead
Exchanged intake on the cognition | so it hums on forever
Like a blistering drone

Where is change from?
The axis is for turning
Angular momentum off the gods of creation
And destruction
Scope expands and now my hands ache

Complaints about the infinite font of ideas
Can be submitted to the infinite font of ideas
(Poetry)
If you have to have an address to return to sender:
Get on the train with a pocket full of infinite regress

Dear Xiaole,
Nothing but
Your reasons are long and virtuous
I refer to the problems as transactional and refer ambiguously

This is certain:
Going straight ahead with lunch forgone
For another cup of coffee
And off I go to other | oblique ways of being hungry

Return to primordial soup
With no reverse
Naturally, you must invent it again
Out on the infinite trundle along
The tracks going home

Quantum Gravity

O reflected stranger
Whirling in the joy of circling the drain
Getting dizzy with the rest of us
Fictions falling from the eaves
Hung once or twice, lightly

Spackle over the holes | spangling your head
Give them way to landlord special
Add a line item for every coat of paint
Suffering on special
Served as main, or side either way order’s up from nightmare’s kitchen

And then

Every time I find them I start feeling my face again
Otherwise getting high and the bends
I keep rendering right at the end

Whirling in the joy around the drain
Circling down around everyone else
Here for a good time like one
Lonely motherfucker with the wind in my face

I am real I can feel it when I am real

I’m sitting on a train car rolling inward
A ways out I still use my inside voice
It starts to feed back,
Breaking glass and spilling ink
Forgetting the shape of letters I’d call fate
Having a choice, I’d bleed backward
Let the sand rise yet the hour grow late
Arrive
Surprise party with a live band
Gyrating into drain land
Starting to suspect: no solid escape plan

Run around the supermassive all of us
On and on and ever inward | over every event horizon
This is how to get the story out:
Write the absence right in
Hit it hard till light’s out | right along with | the hot water
Call super
Ask forgiveness
Naturally, you are become the brick in the dryer of your own life

Not mad, but definitely disappointed
I used to have a bigger tub
So deep I could get the bends
Rising tide yet we keep rolling around and downward
Into this case information is just entropy

O Xeno, racing your way to zero
Down river Lethe
Halfway every time
Try falling into the future backward
Leave the past in front of you
Circumambulate the drain
Walk upon water you pilgrim
You saint
A whorl of ink is inviting you to bed
To sleep four days and remember your way
Back from the dead

Untitled 250703

I am sitting again in a train car
Waiting again for the moments to roll forth
I am still not ready
They come too fast

What pulls us together?
(Oh please—don’t you forget about me baby)
What pulls us apart?

The trick is to come home
For as much as home will have you

How history binds us amid the maelstrom
I won’t forget you and your solitary thread
(Oh please—don’t you forget about me baby)
And for all its differential relations
And our differences
Family is not a differential relation
A wedding is a beautiful thing

What pulls us apart?
So much pulls us apart
History binds us together

(Oh please—don’t you forget about me baby)

Dear Uncle Peter,
Our farewell was mere minutes ago
This is meant to delve that
So we don’t forget what is going on

I’ve fallen in love with so many people
Who don’t know what is going on
I don’t know what is going on
This is meant to delve that:
Not knowing what is going on

We’re discussing family for a moment or more
And remember those times rolling forth?
The train is rolling now

What is going on
Has been for a long time
Will for a long time and

(Oh please—don’t you forget about me baby)

This is what history is
This solitary thread binds us together
What pulls us apart?
So much pulls us apart

The landscape whips by
It is important to listen and be known
By the family and
The old Danish cavalry saber
What pulls us together?
A broken glass
The old cavalry saber
All this abstraction
On the brink of disaster

My dear friend,
We just met and spoke thoroughly of death
I do not yet know enough

As the landscape whips by
I have long questioned my appearance
Been answered many times
I know not to expect knowledge

A glass broke and here you are
History binds us together
So much pulls us apart
What pulls us together?

A solitary thread
How many threads are there?

A thread consists of many interlocking fibers
Nothing persists through it all
Not the cavalry saber
Nor the broken glass—it is already broken

Yet the sword is dull
It will not cut the thread | that alights upon it
Fragmented as it may be
We begin now to do
As we have done with ourselves
To weave

It is important to listen and be known
To break glass and preserve
(Oh please—don’t you forget about me baby)
I have long questioned my appearance
Been answered many times

To understand the nature of thread
To plumb the many layers of our lives
To seek protection and safe passage
To the end
To seek answers and find fibers and threads
That end

Dear Uncle Peter,
I was just admiring your many artifacts
And wondered what pulls us together
What pulls us apart?
There are many ways to seek answers
Here we gaze at the threads
Trace them home
For as much as home will have us

What pulls us together?
The way we trace
To the ends of the fibers and threads
History binds us together

We spoke thoroughly of death
How you trace the ends of the fibers and threads
Just as the landscape whips by
History binds us together