My PJ Harvey Problem

I’m trying to explain

my begrudging hatred

of PJ Harvey

I’m investigating deeply

whether my trouble with her

has something to do

with gender, with youth

and what if it does?

how do I work through that?

after all, I know some brilliant people

who find her to be a genius

what am I missing?

what do I lack?

but maybe rather then it being my fault

perhaps Polly Jean is to blame

perhaps her songs are lacking

some semblance of listenability

because her sensibilities

are built upon

the ravenous curtailing of certain emotions, followed by

the ravenous dispensing of selected other emotions

i.e., her songs (except C’mon Billy) suck

whatever the reason, consider the investigation

incomplete

November 20, 1997


(note: Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea made this "problem" disappear) 

Devil Got My Woman #2*

Among the dropped papers
In the long night of demons
In the short drive from moment to next
A girl, with her hand, in the salad bowl
Recalls the name of the man
In the vision she had
Before she stopped having visions
She shudders because
It’s clear to her now
That the man’s name
Is on both sides of one page in the pile
No picture
No mention of no children
Just his name twice, once in bold 

She keeps her hair pins
And her earrings
And her feathers
And her beads
In the bowl
She doesn’t use it for salad 

The named man was famous in his small city
For a song about kissing cousins
A charmed man and a charmless woman
Their doomed love, their devout air
Rumors tossed to sea overboard
Grown children skipping through forests
Where snow falls instead of leaves
The charmed man forgot their kisses
Deflected her love like a moonbeam off a Toyota
But the charmless woman never forgot anything
Except forgetting
So she jumped off the bridge
Near where the poet jumped and died
24 years earlier, a year before she was born
The charmed man, her third cousin
Read at her funeral
Like he was the smartest kid at a small town poetry reading
Rhyming “stop the bleeding”
With “5 a.m. feeding”
Then he turned her life into a song
About the deadly perils of doing wrong
It had a melody like a flock of geese  

The woman with the salad bowl
Finds the page and files it away
She walks outside for air
And for the opposite of air
She presses shuffle
That song, like a beast of a love gone north for the spring
Plays first
She practically skips down Wilshire Boulevard as she hears:  

“This river’s not like
That river, I like
Both rivers until
One takes my true love away” 

She slows to a walk
Because practically skipping makes no sense
For a song like that
Notwithstanding facts like

“I like his voice”
“She had a choice”

In glorious noise there’s often the absence of nowhere
The opposite of light deflected
Off the dirtiest greenest dirt-green
Lake of the Isles gosling 

Spring, 2006

*title courtesy of bluesman Skip James, as cited in Ghost World

M * D = Y

It's one of those days
Where if you multiply the month by the day
You get the year
1.10.10

Just like 9.10.90
My great lost birthday
The one I can't remember
It came around and then left town
I was a hotel guest in my own hometown
I had an eight-month stint and they let me down
Sent me back to California with my eyes averted
Way past closing time in the 909, sweet friend of mine
Where'd you find the time?

Just like 1.9.09
It didn't seem like a harbinger
I didn't look like a dead ringer
For the tall blank scepter in the church hall hell-light
Good thing I'm not
Good thing I'm special and a doctor
Good thing I'm good
Good thing I'm stylish and a doctor
Yeah, 1.9.09
She told me I could come back
With or without the laptop
She told me I was funny
I was funny because of the laptop

But that anniversary has past
Just like 8.12.96
I boarded the plane at LAX
Leaving town forever
Said I was never coming back
Said I was never even thinking about coming back
I soared all the way to Boston
Rented a car with two cats in it
Hated my new home inside of a minute
Hey Amherst - it's not your fault
I had unfinished business in two other time zones
I've since learned... that unfinished business can be left alone
There's always a new land ahead around every corner
With faucets and fixtures and squirrels and sweethearts
There's no need to write the story myself
Just let it be


I'll stay silent on the math 
Just arbitrary numbers
Means nothing now, meant nothing then
Might mean nothing on the 5th of February
2.5.10
Then comes 5.2.10 and 10.1.10 and two more times next year

1.10.10

Unincorporated East Los Angeles #5

The 6th day of the second decade of the 21st century

Feels like 1972 to me

Just pick a house - any house - at random

Like the one where...

Sly Stone says to the encyclopedia salesman at the door

"Only need K through O. Got everything else.

Ain't buying the rest of the alphabet

Nothing's changed since '68 anyway"

The salesman can smell the royalty checks and stands down

But Sly knows the music's not infinite

Which means the money's not infinite

Besides

He doesn't live here

He's just visiting

Staying with some lady

She's missing K-L

She's missing M

She's missing N-O

Sly's new girl is picking up her only son, her only child

From the new elementary school up by ELAC

He's in 1st grade

Doesn't know Sly Stone from Sky Saxon

And believes what his dad says about his mom

More than he believes his mom

"The guy your mother's dating ain't no rock star

He just looks like one

He's got that crazy hippie vibe

His name's Victor

Just got done with doing time

Sits around all day

Writes manifestos

Hides them in the middle pages of mid-alphabet encyclopedias

His name's not Sylvester or Sly or Sky or Sy or Spy vs. Spy

It's Victor"

Mom takes the kid up north

Car breaks down halfway up

She sells some gold for a Gremlin

Sly - not Victor - gets tired of waiting

In a neighborhood that isn't his

He packed up his three suitcases

Takes a cab to a train to another train to Oakland

Forgets his medication

Forgets to re-tape the pages he tore out about Papua New Guinea

When he finally gives up on finding her, that runaway, that run-fast-and-far-away mother

It had been seven days

Six mail days and the letter came

In penmanship that never needs lined paper

She wrote:

"Thank you for

Giving me a moment to think

Letting me be a threat

To no one but

Myself

I belong to no one

Again"

Sly wondered how she knew to send it to his house
He looks at the postmark
San Luis Obispo
So she sent it on her way back down
So she took he coastal route
What she said on her way back down
She belongs to no one
She belongs to her only son

At the Grammys, in the dead spot between

Best New and Best Old

The session musicians sneak out back and the subject

Always come back to Sly and if he's okay or if he's Sly, high and goodbye

Between bourbon coughs, the bassist from the Valley shakes his head slightly

And the drummer from Covina says "maybe it's time to intervene"

The mom and her son heard he'd be here but he's home

300+ miles away, but they stay for the end of it anyway

The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face wins it all

Back home she picked up that half-piece of paper where Sly wrote the note

She wondered why he couldn't use a full sheet and what he meant when he wrote
"Come into my kitchen, there's fire and water in here"

1.6.10

Unincorporated East Los Angeles #4

We waited until the lamp fell

Before we thought to change the bulb

We listened to three collisions that night

From the freeway down the little hill down the frontage road

If these are the details that make you listen

And yours are the decals that stick

To the wall behind the outdated stereo

And the dead turntable dust cover

Then baby you're a fighter AND a lover

We weren't really made for each other

But this land was made for being you

1.5.10

Robert Cray's Wednesday

Robert Cray asked the lady

at the bus stop where she got her hair done
she said "I don't know but if you ask the lord, he'll tell you"
Robert put the words to paper and asked the lady her name
she said "is that my bus?, my name is God, and yes that is my bus"

Bobby didn't know what to do with this

He walked with his guitar down Main Street

To the place where it ended, the runway of cars

Made of steel, made of tin, made of flames

He found his El Camino

The car he named Victoria

He revved her up, put her in gear and rolled out of town

He made it home to the suburbs, to his blue and white house

With its niches and its copper antiquities

He said to his wife "I'm a bluesman, dear. I'm a bluesman for life"

His wife cried in her honey jasmine tea

She'd been to the bank that day

And the library. And the dry cleaners. And the butcher on Main Street

"I saw you talking to God" she said

"I didn't know she was a woman

And that she rides the bus

The uptown bus

The one called number 6"

Bobby said

"Yes, but I didn't know at the time

She was God, I just had to know

Where she got her hair done and if she carried a heavy load"

He continued

"Anyway. She just said she was God

She may have been lying, like your mother did to us

When she said we'd get the Forerunner

We never got the Forerunner"

But Robert Cray's wife

Had left the house by now

Slamming the door, in unison with Robert's next to last syllable

She ran down the cul de sac, screaming these words

"Bluesman, fuck yourself!"

Written in an office in Encino, 2003

Before the Parade

There won’t be a rustling of leaves
Or a pulled string of pained expressions
Or light bulbs left on inside the monument
But there may be dusk
Followed by a night
When weepy people find a way
To mark time with indecision
To make fine art with pencils
To make all the little sorrows
Big
Whole
Brooding


There won’t be a decade left for dead
Or an energetic healing of the lifeless
Or an antsy angel fidgeting away
But there may be a pageant
Followed by a slight
In which absolution of morality
Is a game to play with knives
Is a carol sung by owls
Is the big whole sorrows turned to
Brood
Melt
Flicker


There will be a moment
Before we leave the room
When the hint of recognition
That we will leave the room
That there will be a moment
Makes us stay


(written some time between 2002 and 2004)