Monday, October 10, 2016

TV Programme of a Monk Sealed into a Coffin





The traditional Thelonious Monk, born ninety-nine years ago today, birthday post: Pieces via a Hamster. I don't know as much jazz as I should and want - I've only two ears, so many years - but I do know Monk because, you know, piano.













GASLIGHT

Tom Raworth

a line of faces borders the strangler’s work
heavy european women
mist blows over dusty tropical plants
lit from beneath the leaves by a spotlight
mist in my mind a riffled deck
of cards or eccentrics
was i
a waterton animal my head
is not my own
poetry is neither swan nor owl
but worker, miner
digging each generation deeper
through the shit of its eaters
to the root – then up to the giant tomato
someone else’s song is always behind us
as we wake from a dream trying to remember
step onto a thumbtack
two worlds – we write the skin
the surface tension that holds
                                       you
                                       in
what we write is ever the past
curtain pulled back
a portrait behind it
is a room suddenly lit
looking out through the eyes
at a t.v. programme
of a monk sealed into a coffin
we close their eyes and ours
and still here the tune
moves on



  
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6 comments:

  1. Must respectfully disagree. The reference was to a Spielberg movie about the 13th president. The context was dialogue about how to get the 13th Amendment passed. I would've said okay, you want to buy a house. Owner's asking 250,000 (I know). You're prepared to pay 240,00—your private position. So you offer 230,000—your public position. Anybody who tries to make more out of it than that is grotesquely uncharitable & is probably too deeply influenced by the sewage bubbling up from the fever swamps about HRC's dishonesty to see that. Or has never negotiated a thing in their life. It's too easy to say "what a fuckin' hypocrite" because it confirms their bias. Bottom line: what she's saying to the banksters is "look, we all know how to make a deal here. I can get things done in Congress." And—bonus bottom line—that has always been the right's biggest criticism of Obama, to wit: he comes in and demands what he wants & sticks to it, leaving no room for the other side to save face with their constituencies by "winning" the negotiation and talking him down from his initial position.

    Okay, I'll delete my account now.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Dude.

      Chill. Trump's not gonna win.

      Delete
    2. Also too (since I wish I'd wrote that here instead of twot

      @140xLangame Which doesn't change the dishonest intent of her answer. A fact-checked swerve is still a swerve. TBH, I thought it funny.

      Delete
    3. Except the context of the original remark, which involved getting her moneyed constituency what it wants in spite of her publicly stated position, was cloaked in a vomit-inducing analogy with the abolition of slavery. That she really used the analogy doesn't make her back-faced support of banksters less sickening. And that right-wingers criticism reaks of sewage doesn't make her smell better.

      Delete
  2. I second the "Trump's not gonna win" part -- particularly given it's spectacularly clear that Da People aren't, either.

    (Insert a chorus of "How Fucked Are You Now?" here.)

    ReplyDelete
  3. I would have watched the debate but I had to peel a potato. Love Monk, here's my favorite album with Monk and Trane:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2ZFdJEPi2Y&list=RDW2ZFdJEPi2Y#t=5
    Ruby My Dear is a masterpiece of composition.

    ReplyDelete