DB Fishman

Here Comes The Fun

For a Quiet Life

The Church of Tautology Streets Immemorial Rosemary Kennedy Flirting with Fascism Hamburg Afterlife

Ghost Notes A-dullt

There Are More Burning Offering

Life on an Abstract Plane Overseer

Word and images

© DB Fishman 2014, 2015

With thanks to The Free Range Poets

Max Cavalera

For a Quiet Life

In the suburban silence

Warm windows glow with

Their own brand of slow-burning

hellfire

The Church of Tautology

To specify denomination As Tautology: Monastic monotony The repetitious rites of The holy boredom A captive animal’s pacing, back and Forth, from wall to wall; addicts’ Logic; insanity’s definition Nam-myoho-renge-kyo Heliocentric, each day We reiterate Our efforts As the sun Rises, falls And repeats We admit our lives Have become unmanageable A higher power Greater than ourselves Joey Ramone counting the front steps Billy Bob Thornton turning the mailbox key

The repetition Of the ritual of The repetition of The ritual Mind cleared in the Comfort of order’s Familiarity; a peace -ful potentiality Like searching for an Odd-shaped stone To rid yourself Of the hiccups With faith in the disciplined Act of committing Over and over again We expect to stumble on Enlightenment

Streets Immemorial

This is the natural flora of the city Bursting forth, wrapped in cellophane Reaching – glistening – for the sky Tied tight by plastic tags to the Railings and signposts that harvest them These spontaneous shrines, their Profusion in proportion to the Grief they give tangible form to Bike frames painted ghost-white Ribbons and laminated Photographs of young faces Laid bouquets fade ragged as heartfelt Handwriting runs in the rain Only the tied plastic can withstand A colour explosion slowly Choking on the fumes of the passing Blank traffic and ambulances Washing away but for the rags Clearing their space, ready For being replaced

Rosemary Kennedy

Betrayed

Grinding up against the gears of society

Betrayed

Searching under the cool cover of empty night

Betrayed so completely, so wholly

Still talking as they put the knife in

They said

Rosemary

So many

Birthday balloons

Out in Wisconsin

And none of them ever to visit

Rosemary Kennedy (1918-2005) was a sibling of John F. and Robert F. Kennedy. At the age of 23, in response to mood swings, rebellious behaviour and sneaking out at night from her convent school, she was subjected to a lobotomy. She lived out the rest of her life in a care home in Wisconsin.

Flirting with Fascism (West Palm Beach, ’76)

One night in the studio, we dressed Bill up as Hitler. He’d had a few drinks, so it was easy. We got some gaffer tape, really strong tape that sticks to most things, and we put it on his head, making his hairstyle like Hitler’s. We gave him this uniform and whatnot, and he was enjoying it all until we tried to take this stuff off him. We couldn’t get it off his head, because pulling the tape off would mean ripping his hair out. So we basically Cut all his hair off. Taken verbatim from Tony Iommi, Iron Man (2011). London: Simon & Schuster UK; p. 156.

Hamburg Afterlife

P.S.H. 07.1967 – 02.2014 The moan of lowslung cellos The great actor is dead Stood out in the interlocking Balconies of Brutalism Sat in hazy bars, waiting in Car parks, breathing smoke In Hamburg streets & hallways with The soft, slick luxury of

high-end German cars Bristled jowls, straining Tie and wheezing weight Hair a sweep of harbour squall Before a stacked, impenetrable Wall of shipping containers Here everyone’s a watcher The local force in riot gear The perpetual rolling of road on tires And a cellphone clutched tiny In his bearlike paws

Ghost Notes

Jamie Foxx sits in rags The voices silent, his Hair thinning, in the auditorium. All his worldly possessions safely Locked away in a shopping cart. Unbalanced and unmedicated, sat Next to Robert Downey Jr., Unable to take the stage himself, he Watches, with joy in his heart As Jaco Pastorius, agile, Lank hair hanging down as He dances with the music, pulls Out the notes of a ‘Portrait of Tracy’ - Released when he was just 24 - With gnawed fingertips, letting them Fall where they may, those Otherworldly bass tones, an Oasis of chiming beauty amidst His irascible moods How can the community Be expected to care For those who not only Cannot but will not Care for themselves?

Nathaniel Ayers, as portrayed by Academy Award winner Jamie Foxx, In the safe confines of his homeless shelter Take his cello by the neck and, holding It like a woman, lays down a Heartbreaking in memorium All across the world On waves of acclaim In eddies of drugs both Prescribed and self- Medicating; too hypomanic To be fit for the stage, Jaco Pastorius, haggard and Living on the streets, irritates A nightclub bouncer and is Beaten into a coma. He died nine days later.

A-dullt

A solution to my existential crises came to me at thirty, one morning before waking I thought: God, this has gone on for ages already

There Are More

i. Gutshot A gathering of Shins and ulnas Raising off our Knuckles as Clusters of Limbs open forth, Over the ages, Revealing the Soft, unshielded Underbelly beneath A hard, costal shell With heart and brain safely armour-encased man learns it can take several long, slow hours to die from a gutshot

ii. Millions now living Will never die Between 1968 and 2011 the number of souls aboard this planet doubled After 200,000 years We now stand An all-encompassing 7 billion The curve of the extinction rate dives Up a cliff to meet our ascendancy Any creature with a heart’s Natural expectancy can Be measured by The simple figure of 1 billion heartbeats Except for man, who Through experiment and Pre-emptive defence has Prolonged to more than Twice that allocation The apex predator, Unevolving, only Competing with itself

A vast wave, beyond All context and resources, this Exponential proliferation Swarms of jellyfish Spawning across to Glut a body of dead water A shadow on the globe Creeping ever forward, with Only ocean floors left untouched Every next generation, a Solution deferred, justified in The virtue of just carrying on Soul allocations rationed, divided, subdivided and so on As individuals, unable To extract or Recognise ourselves From the big picture, in The quintessential role Of the villain A consumption of all

There are more And there is less The sixth extinction Is us, Holocene Till the headstone bells Of safety coffins ring out To initiate Celestial queues

Burning Offering

I. The hammer & sickle still hangs over Chernobyl Weathered atop its long-abandoned buildings And fallout eventually came to rest in The grass of Scottish coasts Fallout shelters rust in basements Thousands of lessons wasted Teaching children how to duck and Suffer the blast Concrete, steel, water, metre-thick glass All that stands between us and them Monitoring containing managing these Writhing, restless serpents Their benevolence satiates our dependence Our progress resting on their generosity Unmarked warheads traverse nights’

Silent motorways Reactors carry payloads, cycling through Oceans’ depths And discarded and forgotten, containers Left in water rot, dwarfing time Pipes crack and algae chokes stagnant water Tsunami crack and crumble concrete Nature abhors an isolation And the storage ponds are boiling now

II. The Geiger crackle signifies the kraken is awakening These caged suns, straining at their bars Enough to evaporate a life in seconds Enough to burn the world Pervasive, permeating and invisible Untouchable by human hands Consequences of such tenacious permanence They could out-half-live what we know as living Clinging to sucking in seawater for stability Having outgrown gods, we made our own Unstoppable, they can only be contained We are no longer working in a human scale III. And The error is us; each opportunity to learn Could also be the end of us, we must Be better: cutting rather Than corners or economics Our own complacency, but The world is still hungry For energy to burn So white-out your windows In reverence

Life on an Abstract Plain Cold essence flows Speeding, through bones As rends in the Substance itself Swim closer – not like Swimming, but more Refocussing Rethinking Vast pits open up Unseen depths venting Accelerating Destabilising Unrest and warmth Burgeon, unfurl then Pass across, leaving Pin points far enough To as well be Forever or Scratched on the Nearest facing wall A burst of expansive Glare fills everything To leave a temporarily Blind emptiness

Shapes in colour And vectors of movement Move close by then far Everything else is Hollow echo, an Endless swim And the white light Approaches, looms Nudgingly near Vibrating So bright that It’s almost tainted Blue, almost Touching And then Suddenly retreats And it’s So far out here And cold

Overseer The man in the moon Appears to be exhaling His eyes streaming As he looks down on a world That never looks up