Iron and Wine poetry

Just today, I tried to listen to Iron and Wine's newest offering, Kiss Each Other Clean, without success. Any close listening reminded me immediately of how inferior anything on the album was compared to what Mr Beam graced us with in his 2007 release. Before long, I was back looping those verses of Innocent Bones over and over again. The act itself was a repeat of what I did during a hot Taiwanese summer day 4 years ago now. Going back and forth, figuring out the words, and scribbling them on my palm. Back then, it was because I didn't want old sentimental nonsense framing my various army paraphernalia. It's not very seemly. Now, it's because I'm working on a problem set trying to prove that a bilinear form on Rn can always be represented by tensor products of the natural bases of R. Putting soft pen to mathematical paper, not exactly seemly either.

So etching those words into a place I can almost fold up and pack into my lonesome seems quite appropriate. So is watching them fade over the course of a day, as if they were seeping in slowly to color my own veins.

Cain heard a cat tumble limp off the rooftop
Abel heard his papa pray
And even the last of the black-eyed babies say
That every saint has a chair you can borrow in a church to sell
That the wind blows cold across the backs of a master and the kitchen help
There's a big pile of innocent bones still holding up the garden wall
And it was always the broken hand we learned to lean on after all

We were talking recently about how the ancients seemed to remember things so much better, so much more precisely than us today. We said that maybe it was a better ear they developed for rhyme and rhythm, the Homers and Chaucers of the day. I think that has to be at least partly right. It must have something to do with how a verse of music can equip a given set of moments with its own distance metric, analytically separate from that of time or Euclidean space. Here in my room in Chicago, those unending ridgelines of South Taiwan provide me closer shelter than do the buildings in this university. That misty summer morning is unquestionably exponentially closer to me now than it was yesterday. Order, order is preserved.

king's crossing

the king's crossing was the main attraction
dominoes falling in a chain reaction
the scraping subject rules by fear
he told me whiskey works better than beer

the judge is on vinyl
decisions are final
and nobody gets a reprieve
and every wave is tidal
if you hang around you're going to get wet
i can't prepare for death anymore than i already have

all you can do now is watch the shells
the game looks easy, that's why it sells

frustrated fireworks inside your head
are going to stand and deliver
talk instead

the method acting that pays my bills
keeps a fat man feeding in beverly hills

i got a heavy metal mouth
it hurls obscenity
and i get my check from the trash treasury
cuz i took my own insides out

it don't matter cuz i've no sex life
and all i wanna do now
is inject my ex wife

i've seen the movie and i know what happens

it's christmas time and the needles on the tree
a skinny santa's bringing something to me
the voice is overwhelming
his speech is slurred
and i only understand every other word

open your parachute and grab your gun
falling down like an omen
a setting sun

read the part and return at five
it's a hell of a role if you can keep it alive

but i don't care if i fuck up
i'm going on a date with a rich white lady
ain't life great

give me one good reason not to do it
BECAUSE WE LOVE YOU
so do it

this is the place where time reverses
dead men talk to all the pretty nurses
instruments shine on a silver tray
don't let me get carried away