Hot Chip - Over and Over

Tramp in Flames - Paul Farley

Tramp in Flames

Some similes act like heat shields for re-entry
to reality: a tramp in flames on the floor.
We can say Flame on! to invoke the Human Torch
from the Fantastic Four. We can switch to art
and imagine Dali at this latitude
doing CCTV surrealism.
We could compare him to a protest monk
sat up the way he is. We could force the lock
of memory: at the crematorium
my uncle said the burning bodies rose
like Draculas from their boxes.

         But his layers
burn brightly, and the salts locked in his hems
give off the colours of a Roman candle,
and the smell is like a foot-and-mouth pyre
in the middle of the city he was born in,
and the bin bags melt and fuse him to the pavement
and a pool forms like the way he wet himself
sat on the school floor forty years before,
and then the hand goes up. The hand goes up.

Tramp in Flames. Picador. 2006

Zola Jesus - Dangerous Days

Night is - José Duarte (a google poem)

Adult Jazz - Springful

Frequency Modulation - Raymond McDaniel

you are listening to

the transmission via seed pearl, aural irritant

clockwork and sparkgap ultra high and superlow

precious black opal crystal and glass shudders and sings

broad cast scattered the seeds among the apocrypha

each agent at land or sea satellite or space

direct conversion of royal register and groove

high in fidelity to

our regenerative radio hisses and shouts

everything that cannot be owned belongs now to us

irradiant waves oscillate below visible light

to arrive and reside requires no medium but occupies vacuum

and air transformational emission

follow your radiotelegraph

we are your conductor our amplitude varies

we fluctuate the frequency

we are not subject to static interference

we embed the subcarrier

hush y’all

you need not know that language if you know this sound

 

Salwater Empire. Coffee House Press, 2008.

Bastille - Pompeii @ the British Museum