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Difficult Loves

by Ghostlimb

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1.
I hated you at first I couldn’t sleep through the night no semblance of dread but strange flashes of light dark grey and mauve walls white cobwebs and all create a locus of triumph and defeat too much has gone by in a single empty space that stands in the way of an unfettered escape imagine the pull gravitational cosmos every morning and afternoon anxiety en route I turn my head each way to look at you think of the guts destroyed the teeming overrun milieu “Amid so much open land there seemed to be no space that met their criteria of ‘civilized urbanity’. Los Angeles, for all its fleshpots and enchantments, was experienced as a cultural antithesis to nostalgic memories of pre-fascist Berlin or Vienna…Los Angeles became increasingly symbolized as the ‘anti-city’, a Gobi of suburbs.” --Mike Davis “City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles” (1990)
2.
distance I've felt miles I've known years be it "paradise" awash with pretense though rich canopies persist or "basin" a great river's meander though long since gone births persistence I can't compare merits shared whether basement or hilltop bus stop or wetland I am glad to have found you “That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. That land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten.” --Aldo Leopold "A Sand County Almanac" (1949)
3.
I’ve said something new I’ve said nothing at all I cringed at the summer and hated the fall a lumbering listless ennui absorbed by the car crash bottlenecked for eternity what’s the purpose in such disengagement barely moved by light from even extinct suns a subtle hostility, compelling it gave me a purpose a reason to breathe but now it’s just stifling and it took time to grasp to stay the sharpened axe embrace reprieve for all the worst we did so when the story does end with confidence “To nature’s creatures we allot the spring and the summer, To the doe, the bear, the gold-finch and the hummer. To the fishes we ascribe the deep blue sea, The honey we apportion to the bustling bee. To the pessimist—good cheer—his mind to sooth, To the chronic liar, we donate the solemn truth.” --Nicola Sacco “Last Will” (1927)
4.
I acknowledge the risk but I trust empirically in the ribs that break the eyes that see I always believed in the lengthening reach beyond our own restricted field of vision but the terror of days the gnashing hours of teeth a debt of autonomy a built up and torn down Corioli why I’d push against a Volscan tide is only now clear to me every road we trod along and all the kindred spirits and love we lost nothing’s more clear than the sound of shattered bone every dent and bruise is ours and ours alone “And when Philip wrote thus to the Spartans: If once I enter into your territories, I will destroy ye all, never to rise again; they answered him with the single word, If.” --Plutarch “Moralia” (100CE)
5.
I followed you down some dark alleys and found a few cul-de-sacs of my own tied to the dual grace of war within and composure unknown that eclipse desire unleashed rushed through the veins bypassed the prostrate heart and with avarice sought the brain the cloaked thief of indiscretion and impunity’s velvet rule a kinship well worn laid waste the unity of throttlehold and jugular Agon attentive never derelict of his duty only purged by the smart of acuity you knew everything the north south west and east with familiarity the geography of their bodies and we rend it asunder rend asunder through circulation circumscribed and a fist clenched tight we gripped it with one hand then kicked it down the stairs conscience: a tumor on the body of early morning the dual grace of necks hacked clean ripped through the fence-sitting agnostics with the causticity of complete certainty to release a Virgil in the Lethe a Baron in the trees a body washed ashore on Caracol Beach every atrocious moon and every son bitter the ever-flowing fount of piss and vinegar across the fields of youth filled with loss and doom emerge clearer “The naked man climbed a willow tree. The valley was all woods and shrub-covered slopes, under a gray hump of mountain. But at the end of it, where the torrent turned, there was a slate roof with white smoke coming up. Life, thought the naked man, was a hell, with rare moments recalling some ancient paradise.” --Italo Calvino “Difficult Loves” (1949)
6.
Brushfire 03:41
I guess there’s just a meanness in this world a slumped forward concession a teary-eyed wasted insight a brushfire war on every front inattentive lack of ambition offset by the collective acts of indiscipline and inspiration and I too sate that hunger for the deep and give up on everyone and everything and I too sate that hunger for the deep daily as often as I recommit readily to what I still hear and read and see that life is still worth living without gods or masters or heroism no martyrs basking in religious contemplation but there are those who deserve respect carrying on to the dawn doing good without remuneration “Who built the seven towers of Thebes? The books are filled with the names of kings. Was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone? . . . In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished, Where did the masons go? . . . --Bertolt Brecht “Questions from a Worker Who Reads” (1935)
7.
over time I shift major to minor tonality from the storms that breached and the rising sun while everyone’s asleep a bitter and caustic critique can be sung so sweetly between the folds in the sheets under a helmet at speed or late at night over a bottle of whiskey with Sleepwalk on repeat funneled through a string of lights the biting air and rising exhaust the kindred spirits steadily lost comingled with the exhaled smoke perfume that reeks or the cedar chest opened with a creak full of worthless chaff childhood casts potentialities long past when the sun comes up my inspiration fails “Strain your wine and prove your wisdom; life is short; should hope be more? In the moment of our talking, envious time has ebb'd away.” --Horace “Odes” (23 BCE)
8.
Nine 00:59
under the delusion that they desire your participation in the most basic affairs it’s aching feet it’s calloused hands the creased document mocks a directionless persistence no matter how the ratio breaks it’s just a sad joke made where those of weak analysis are easily convinced as long as they consent they are forever faultless throw their undeserved support to the wind and throw their votes in the trash in the end under the delusion that they inspire any participation beyond a bullet catcher in a body bag a suspect opinion “In one way or another, as vigorous he-man or kindly father, the candidate must be glamorous. He must also be an entertainer who never bores his audience. Inured to television and radio, that audience is accustomed to being distracted and does not like to be asked to con¬centrate or make a prolonged intellectual effort. All speeches by the entertainer-candidate must therefore be short and snappy. The great issues of the day must be dealt with in five minutes at the most -- and prefera¬bly (since the audience will be eager to pass on to something a little livelier than inflation or the H-bomb) in sixty seconds flat . . . From a pulpit or a platform even the most con¬scientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth. The methods now being used to merchan¬dise the political candidate as though he were a deo¬dorant positively guarantee the electorate against ever hearing the truth about anything.” --Aldous Huxley “Brave New World Revisited” (1958)
9.
Dima selflessly buried in archives deep dig up and unfurl the fabric of fractured sleep driven forth by the demons of transparency paleology an alphabet evolving constantly perhaps a closed door for a grieving family who know simply but with no specificity there’s nothing worse than a song in the head never put to tape the palimpsest of unrealized dreams entire existence wiped clean from paper and sanitized “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” --Milan Kundera “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” (1979)
10.
how many ways to sell the tired packaged white man’s burden from open arms of her majesty to the smoke of Santiago streets and at fifteen years do you make a kid aware that their entire life has been engulfed in factions and struggles and juntas devolving without ever knowing obscured in the open ignored by definition because it is somewhere else and one does not look beyond the branches of its own stunted elm unless for resource so the roots dug deep into the mire beneath the loamy skin tones beneath the Tropic of Cancer at the crux of fruitlessness at the genesis to instability’s foundation where the chemotherapy offered is the same essence as the infection “History does not repeat itself, but it delights in patterns and symmetries. When the stories of American “regime change” operations are taken together, they reveal much about why the United States overthrows foreign governments and what consequences it brings on itself by doing so. They also teach lessons for the future.” --Stephen Kinzer “Overthrow” (2006)
11.
Life's Blood 03:32
well witcher brought life from the top of a hill that moments before lay stamped browned overlooking the salty blue where the Tunitas makes its way "small" life long gone atop cracked soil of a reservoir gone dry two days rain a watershed scale shown to those who know where to look a foreign word to many as faucets run while teeth are brushed and toilets flushed "Water says this, 'Wherever you put me I'll be in my home. I am awfully smart. Lead me out of my springs, lead me from my rivers, but I came out of the ocean and I shall go back into the ocean. You can dig a ditch and put me in it, but I only go so far and I am out of sight. I am awfully smart. When I am out of sight I am on my way back home.' " --Norris Hundley, Jr. "The Great Thirst: Californians and Water—A History, Revised Edition" (2001)

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Difficult Loves VIT044

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released February 5, 2015

Justin, Neal, Alex recorded live to tape, mixed, and mastered at the Atomic Garden studio by Jack Shirley in May 2012 and June 2015. Art by Adam Hunt Emptydesignco@gmail.com. This is Vitriol Records VIT044. Questions or contact Jason@graforlock.com.

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