When Betty Wright sings how if you love her
like you say you love her and if you need
her like you say you need her you wouldn't
hurt her and you wouldn't desert
her when you're through as if you
are the last man on the planet and she walked
thousands of miles to find you and pull
you from some wreckage of a building
that fell into itself from the weight of nothing
all that real just to watch you limp away
into some nearby burning forest
knowing in that moment that at the end
of the world the only justice is the rage and fury
of an existence that will watch itself flame out
just as the leaves of the trees become flame
and crisp into smoke and ash and barely a hint
of what they were once, I want to shake
the walls of this apartment and the foundations
of the world until they crumble and gasp
and collapse onto the blind prophets of eternity
that saw into the nature of human despair
and found it too brilliant to see anything else
and in a miscegenation of Samson and Tiresias
I will see the world and the world against
the world and I will hear through the rising
rubble a straining howl of our injustice
hobbling up until it is an orchestra where
every instrument is Betty Wright and the conductor
has lost his baton so the voices clamor over each other
like the waves of the void before the known world
existed singing if you love her if you really love her the way
you say you love her if your words are just the effects
of an entire being and if your love for her
is this being and if you are identical with love
and its object her then why is the world
spinning madly then why is the fire and why
is this the end.
I like this, but I am having a bit of trouble with it. I had to read it a few times, because I read it at a sprint due to the lack of punctuation. I like the lack of punctuation, but I think if you add a bit more of the repetition you get from the song at the beginning it will help slow it down. As the repetition fades away I got a bit lost on the first few read throughs.
ReplyDeleteyoure right, taylor, it's too tough without punctuation. but then, i dont really want to add any except for the crucial comma so instead i tried recording it - this might be better as a spoken piece than a written one, so let me know.
ReplyDeleteI know this is not a helpful comment really, but it's nice to hear your voice. In general. But I guess also for this piece, because it needs the humanity of your voice over the song, because even when I'm not really following I'm still feeling because you are feeling and I am feeling overwhelmed by you and the music and the desperation of how everything is so slippery and can't be pinned down or held onto as meaning from one moment to the next.
ReplyDeletelistening to this with the song in the background is a really, really, really rich experience. it's nice to hear a voice - but it's also hear a voice and watch its relationship to the song it's ventriloquizing or something like that. there's something really intriguing for me that happens with the repetition of the poem's first lines and the chorus at:
ReplyDelete"I will see the world and the world against
the world and I will hear through the rising
rubble a straining howl of our injustice
hobbling up until it is an orchestra where
every instrument is Betty Wright and the conductor"
what i really like about this moment is that it's where the poem's intro is repeated in the song but not in the poem and it feels spontaneous and incredibly rich. the line's repetition marks a development between the poem and the song; the song, on the surface, returns to the chorus, but the feeling, but the subtext of those words is fresh. what's happening when we finally get back to the chorus has been informed by the rest of the song (in the background) and the poem (for me as an infrequent Betty White listener). the story that i'm engaged in is so completely different than what was happening when i first read it, when i first heard it and then the poem doubles back on the song and makes the song fuller and the song underscores the poem and reinforces it.
really love this.
also - i think the punctuation issue is, in part, solved by the audio? or at least it never gets confusing listening to someone talk.
good work, tim...except for the time toward the end where you almost started laughing...but really that was my favorite part.
ReplyDeleteDuuuuuuude! (in a good way) Definitely an audio piece. Am echoing Ian in his comment re:when the poem doubles back on the song, at the end - very powerful. Those last few lines hit hard.
ReplyDeleteI've never had such fun while listening to a poem.
ReplyDeleteZoot Zoot.
they played this song at my prom. no joke.
ReplyDeletei'm mostly with dinah on this. you're competing with the song and the words, but that's what i like. you sound overwhelmed, i am overwhelmed. your voice helps a lot--especially the emphasis you gives things...but somtimes i don't understand why. so things do feel slippery. i think this does better as a spoken word piece. i agree with ian that this clears up the puncuation. maybe being able to read the text of this piece while we can listen is a bit of a handicap for us. i tried to read along as you spoke but i couldn't keep up/find meaning at the same pace. when you italized "her" at the end, i didn't know how to read that and it was a bit frustrating b/c the italics made me feel that i should at least understand its emphasis. but when you spoke with the emphasis of italicized "her" at the end, i liked it. and i questioned it less.
the end is amazing. and maybe why i love it so much is because i can recognize the desperation, the devolving of everything, which was what i understood and felt the most.
i LOVE the moment at the end where you say "if you love her if you really love her"--i love how your voice breaks into a bit of a laugh. that was my favorite part. it's like your voice recognizes the staggering amount of "ifs" and can barely finish the phrase.