Myth of Arrival

Tonight Tan Dun's Ghost Opera is on. There is an instrument in the background I cannot identify. It sounds like a Japanese shamisen; that three-stringed guitar you always see courtesans play in samurai films. I have listened to the CD several times already. The plunking of the chords is triggering something in me. A memory? A memory that isn't mine? Whose then?

I wonder if ghosts can leave their own memories all over you the way we leave finger prints? If all I had to give were memories I'd haunt you and leave only the best. I have many I wouldn't want to part with while I am alive … but when I am dead? who knows what use the dead really have for memories?

And after the first three
chords and Oh and
extraordinary so many
details hourly so many pax
and Ave Marias, markets
full of sunbeams and day
lilies, the milky clouds
of sperm, the broken
egg, your useless scrappy
body, let it burn. A shame
we're all sitting in evening's
back in back alley cafes.
The gibbering, the jabbering,
the heckling, the jekylling
of all the dead and all
the living scribbling out
ultimatums; reckoning
all they need.
Need.

Right. Tonight we dead
linger over your name
do not be flattered; you
made a poor bed mate.
Stop

now. No more ecstasy
laced with cocaine since
I never believed you
when you said it was
a bastard-dawn coming
down. No more of your
Sour Fathers, Hail Marys
or Glory Bees. Face
it, draw closer,
there is no magical
charm that will make
you any more this.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 10th, 2006 at 9:39 pm and is filed under Scantily Clad Info Dump. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.