Get all 6 Iambic Beats releases available on Bandcamp and save 20%.
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of NeurOnFire, House of Cards, Phase/Shift, AlgoRhythms, Dark Matter, and Chiasm.
1. |
House of Cards
05:22
|
|||
|
Perhaps it is a house of cards, what we’ve built around ourselves, meticulously, carefully, painfully, and even indulgently. But who could do differently, deprived of touch?
I’ve read of prisoners who talked to the shade of a lover’s eyes in a burnt sunset while their friends turned to ashes in the sky. I’ve read of people turned into parlor walls. I’ve read of cars and voices and helmets that were the only wild animals we spoke of anymore. And I’ve read of books combusted into black-feathered doves.
Haven’t we all longed for the dandelions to mark us, too? Haven’t we all dreamt of this pain we so richly feel now? Did we not wish for it as a chance to become more? Do we not still?
The house is made of cards.
And what kind are they? Generic store-bought cards, perhaps, that speak like a pronoun in Italian, what they call the impersonal si. There is no I anymore, least of all in team, as the posters in the conference rooms tell us. We are greeting cards. We are nameless, anonymous hearts that mourn your loss sincerely.
This house of cards. This house is made of cards.
But cards are real. We can touch them. What of the things we cannot touch? How do we know we are real? Might this all be an illusion, a simulation? Are we not already at the mercy of receptors distilling information and filtering it into ones and zeros and zeros and ones and bits and pieces are crumbling and it’s all zeros now.
I want to wake up and be a great work of literary art. I want to drink coffee, orange-faced, gazing into the fires of the underground, and mourn nothing of forgotten, wet cheeks and snakes that empty us. I want to be touched. By a page in a book that is really skin, warm and sweet like stone fruit.
The cards, the cards, and all the cards may fall. Maybe they’re falling already. Maybe we are falling already. Perhaps the cards and the bodies and the flowers and the book pages are all descending at 9.81 meters per second squared toward an earth that never wanted us but holds us like a mother just the same.
But what happens when the cards marked Turing and Descartes fall into each other? What of those marked revolutions and tolerance? Will we laugh uncomfortably and shuffle the deck? Will we claim sleight of hand and throw the table across the room? Or will we hold the hand, hold each other’s hands? None of us know, least of all me. After all, there is no I. That’s what the parlor walls tell me…
|
||||
Iambic Beats Los Angeles, California
We have so many titles. A few of mine are: scientist, poet, writer, singer, mom. I like to think I live at the intersection of music and words and always asking questions. A goddamn lovely place to be.
If you like Iambic Beats, you may also like:
Playing with Esu / Where will Ogun Live
by Neo Griot & The Afrocentric Prince
featured on Bandcamp Radio Jan 25, 2022
go to album
Fodder
by Douglas Kearney & Val Jeanty
Poet Douglas Kearney and composer/producer/drummer Val Jeanty link up for a a compelling LP that feels like the written word come to life.
go to album
The Japanese Rimbaud
by Mikado Koko * o g i v e
Mikado Koko blends glitchy ambient with excerpts of poems from the late Japanese experimental poet Chuya Nakahara.
go to album
We Must Be Sacred
by The Last Poets
featured on Bandcamp Radio Oct 23, 2018
go to album
Body Of Work
by Tenesha The WordSmith
featured on Bandcamp Radio Aug 7, 2018
go to album
Jujus/Alchemy of the Blues: Poems by Sarah Webster Fabio
by Sarah Webster Fabio
featured on Bandcamp Radio Jul 24, 2018
go to album
Madea/Dangerous Women
by Tenesha The WordSmith
featured on Bandcamp Radio Mar 13, 2018
go to album
