Thoughts In the Belfry (a folk song)

What follows was written in chunks from beginning to end one morning yesterday. The melody followed, and my notes are included here. Song to come shortly.

Thoughts in the Belfry

part one

Oh to con society and figure on sleep.
Oh to be a weary man who can’t very well see
what is rush houred now,
what is lost in the clouds
And he can’t seem to shine his soles to be better off now.

Wing my lids and shattered tongue and teeth in my mouth.
Resist my mind and open lungs to be ran out of town.
‘Cause it’s breathless and bold,
it is both new and old,
and the seams are ripping past the point of out of control.

Sleep inside a martyrdom and wish on the stars.
Weep for lies, corruption, shadows, and the cycles of Mars.
For the planets align
and their signatures signed
as the past is washing, dried and hung on the lines outside.

There is wanting on the corner store to a shelter in place.
And the people screaming wash and fold in the center of space
are all asleep at the wheel
and delivered from steel
as their shadows slip and gauge the light of all that is real.

(intensify)
(rising melody)
Please beget no singing birds at the crack of all dawns.
And don’t regret your slinging heart, it is found and it’s pawned.
‘Cause the sleep in your eyes
is forgotten with pride
and the circle of the day is just the passing of time.

(ooo)
(ooo)
(ooooooo)
(ooo)

Wear no hat, St Peter, you are withered and freaked.
Your cap and gown don’t graduate from their weathered antique.
And the eagles on poles
were never kept in their role
and the songs you sung were always just a way to console.

(ole…4x)

(intensify)

My oh my, young woman, you are pretty and sleek.
And after wine your face turns red and you cower in sleep.
From the depths of your mind
comes a series of rhymes
and the smoke it coils ’round and ’round you every damn time.

(F#m)
Sing for children wiping out on roller skates.
(F#m)
(melody above the previous)
Cry for minutes so divine, yet coupled with snakes.
‘Cause the evil is tried
and the world’s on its side
as jolts of electricity have my skin fried.

Come with me, St Peter, St Geronimo too.
Come with me, we’ll travel far in the weight of our shoes.
As the books are described,
with their words all inscribed,
’cause the end is growing nearer–at least the stillness of night.

(ooo)
(ooo)
(ooo)

part 2

(quiter)
Sit with me a while and I will tell you a tale
of a worried man who can’t pretend that there’s beer in his pale.
He is drunk and disturbed.
And he is perfectly sure
that his country’s on fire and it surely will burn.

Have a drink, St Katherine, your baby is fine.
Smoke with me I wanna know all that’s on your mind.
Or just be on the way
to wherever you stay.
Yea, it seems to me the roads are froze, they shatter and shake.

(A)
Pick me up, St Martha, oh I believe in you.
Take me out for supper, man, there’s nothing to do
but be quick on the draw
as Jesus twice falls.
Your dogma is a strangle on the city of Paul.

(quietly now)
Find me in the cedar, Michael. Find me on high.
I will count my blessings as you figure me trite.
‘Cause you banish alright,
and your sword’s at your side,
’til finally there’s nothing but the stillness of night.

(intensify)
So God becomes escapable and the water is black.
The springs and pools polluted will be drained and sold back
to divinity’s hands.
It was a well-devised plan.
To steal is fine as long as you’re a company man.

part three

(quiter)
Teach me how to rattle off a series of sleek.
Help me learn how flowers grow as we lay in our sleep.
We belong to the trees,
to the rivers and streams.
For all along the city was a weight on our dreams.

Play with piano, cello, and be joyous and sing.
Play like you were meant to when your mother said, “Please
will you get your guitar?
You’ll be famous, a star.
I’m so proud of the way you keep on playing all the parts.
Oh yeah.”

Mother, I miss seeing you in purple and gold.
Royalty drips off you and it is written in stone.
And the tricks of the mind
were just insanity’s chimes
waking me from the depths of my insidious mind.

(A)
Father, please be careful as pandemics increase.
Curve your speech to match the spike in patterns and pleats.
Yes, your blue jeans are dry
and God’s on your side.
I say bury me in a Beatles shirt with pennies on my eyes.
With pennies on my eyes.
With pennies on my eyes.

Sisters be original in finding your peace.
Watch as angels flutter by on the flashing TVs
with a major insight
to a world on its downside.
Don’t fall off where the sidewalk ends, St Francis will cry.

(quietly now)
So it’s over in the evening when the weather subsides.
It’s over in the morning when the hunger resides.
I am over and done.
I have played and have won.
And the beginning’s just a story of the end that comes.
And the end is the beginning for the newness of love.

(riff)

And To Sleep

To ease,
there is a stepping stone
forgotten of a sergeant’s skeptics,
sinister on ice.
My ears belie to notice sticks and stones
beneath my feet–
a distance courting high regard to peasants.

We lower middle class.
We homes with rooftops.
We internet and phones.
We detached proletariat all sent off alone
to be the voices of our generation.
All of us.
At once.
And we will rise and be risen.
We will Christ at the godfearing heron
who looks pretty from a distance
until you get up close and see the dinosaur eyes,
the beak protruding in a snap.
No bird is more beautiful with faith on its back.
That shit should be cradled;
be grown from a seed and reach far to the sun.
The bird’s wings of wax do melt.
And furthermore, my goodness.
Buckle your seatbelt.

This ride is absurd.
These strings are coerced.
These dynamite districts are breached at the curb
where we deliver our groceries to old uncle sam
who disturbingly gives us 1200 dollars
so it looks like he gives a damn,

and retreat goes the serpent of bloodthirsty tears
upon longitudes, latitudes til the rusty saw shears
off the wool on our eyes.
Are you sick?
So am I.
I, the devil intrepid with worse often side
where the dreams intertwine, where the moon up and shines.
My insolent positivity is wrought with disease.
What is your excuse, sir?
You’re meant to be leading this half-breathing indium,
chemically balanced to spot out bullshit in silence
til the caption reads Yes
and the picture screams No
and we read up some silliness, delusions and so
by the power i yield with my language, i tell you:
get out of the blankets.
Wake
the
fuck
up.

I Am a Patchwork Quilt

Suppose disintegrating into the soil
is the best next place to be,
surrounded by dirt and its worms chomping through.
It’s more there to me than it is to a student of suits.
Yet in an encompassed environment, stemming wood
from its fruit, we go laughing and brimming all cute.
Still disguise yourself, child.
The ecosystem is futile.

And all inside a wildebeest’s throat,
my all-time favorite sharpened toes
kick my own shins raw and tattered.
Who doesn’t know how that happens?
Who doesn’t play in the sand?
Who doesn’t want to ride into town on horseback,
all among the cowboys, dribbling.
Drooling at the sight of majestic hands clapping.
I am a patchwork quilt.
You are driven by fate.
We’re both late for work.

And speaking of work, my my.
Mine is somewhere inside
a place I never thought I’d be.
Seeing how the other half be.
Hearing all the garbage streets
wrapped in finer things.
To places I’m sure I’ll never see.
It frightens me.
But I giggle through grease
and match with a smile and pleasantries.
Caught with a neck pointed east,
dying to leave.

But to know there’s a fever to bear
makes me believe in a memory there
of a county fair,
where I saw tractor pulls,
ate fries
and drank beer.
I’m ready for planks to be planted.
I’m ready for trees and the like.
I’m searching for words, always.
And quietly.

Balderdash

1.
Interestingly, as the year begins to turn over,
and winter is beginning its five-month grip
on the weather,
I am in no more trouble than I could be.
My mood is beginning to waiver, yes–
I have to better watch my temperament.
My shoulders ache,
hunched against the wind
cold and biting.
My hands go dry like sandpaper,
my beard is thin like straw.
My open eyes are blinded by
a frigid rain.
35 degrees is no temperature
for precipitation.

2.
False idols stumble about.
I am inundated with news
that the president is somehow
still popular with
half the country.
Half the country
is stupid
at best
then.

Worse, the overwhelming wish
to block it all out
Cynicism.
Nihilism.
All the isms.

3.
Perfect doctrine rarely slips its wrist;
rarely bends and twists;
rarely plays its part in leaps and flips.
And the only murmur here
is something ripe and rendered clearly,
now my hopeful nature strikes again.
I clench my fists.
I reel and wreck the gist of every story told
I forget as quickly, yes
I forget.

What Belongs in the Future Runs Off With the Past

Hi, hello. This is Michael. The Supposed So. M.C. Guire. I’ve got too many names. Regardless, I’m coming at you in a different sort of way, because I don’t usually write in this manner, sort of conversationally, or whatever, unless I’m writing long-form fiction, and I haven’t been doing that so this part of my brain hasn’t gotten exercise, and needs exercise, so here we are.

I have an album out on Bandcamp today. It’s a good little 6-song EP entitled What Belongs in the Future Runs Off With the Past. Themes of home and memory, the fictional world, and the representative. Each song works as an essay on the past, on my musical influences and hangups; my body of work, and the process of creating art with semantical figments of rhetorical pondering, acoustic guitars, electric guitars, synths, and a drum pad played by hand through a midi keyboard. Indeed, a lot of the atmosphere you experience was made with that midi keyboard, which I bought at a garage sale in Oakland, NJ for the right sum of $10. Never been used. Almost stole it.

My life during the time of this EP (written and recorded all in the past 3-5 weeks) was fine. Nothing ridiculous. School. Papers, essays, reading, class. The Fall. Allie. Things afoot. Moves to be made. I think the record tells the story. Enjoy.

Listen at thesupposedso.bandcamp.com and on your favorite streaming services December 13th.

It Is Tempting

It is tempting to be partial to a wicked nation,
elated as a worshiper of tilted things.
I cover up the margins with a splendid partner
who aches for glinted wings.
Forever tossing between
lightness and weight,
plunged through painted waterfalls,
my armor slips off my body
and I am prodded.
I am stuck.

So, naturally my wandered spirit
lifts into a cloud
and never spoke and never pleased
the angels,
who drift an piousness.
Their greed is just a mailbox, emptied
long and trailed by kings.
Their portioned rights succeed
And I’ll have a bash.

Slogs of stymied dragon’s eggs
slip silently by slogged sandwiches
bogged down in half.
One for you one for me.

Caulk

It’s in the space between the notes that you go caulking up. I fear it is the only thing you truly know to do. You fill in every nook and cranny. The air is trapped inside. Be careful as you do your thing. The whole thing could implode. And yet, there is a fire in your work. There is a tremendous amount of valor to your gallery. There is a serendipitous gathering of factual matter, and your timbre pleases me. But your shapelessness in those strict notes will be the death of me. Will be the end of melody. Will be the harmonious easement of a Mozart-like tremble. You’ll die penniless but not alone. Your masterpiece remains unknown. And the feeling in the beat goes out the door and down the street. Fleeting but neat. And she nods her head along and crashes, lashes fluttering at me.

The music ends. The silence envelops.

Summer In the City, Now

When it rains, I can hear children cry
when can we go outside and play?
When it rains, I see the shipyard’s masts
gone from their aching sails.
When it rains, there are mudslides,
but not where I’m from.
Where I’m from,
the fields go thick with ponds,
spreading.
When it rains, the bales of hay go moldy.

When it rains, there is laughter in my ears
remembering my mother and a tall straw hat.
When it rains I think of lightning
and how our dog, Logan, hated the storms.
Huddled beneath beds,
inside the shower downstairs.
When it rains I see his black coat soaked,
I hear him howling afraid.

When it rains, my eyes sometimes do the same.
When it rains, my tepid nature rings true.
When it rains, our love goes capitalized.
When it rains, it rains, it rains.

When it rains, I can smell the grill still burning
outside from the porch.
When it rains now, I dream of chicken and rice
and chocolate chip cookies for dessert.
When it rains I look sideways
and see you sitting there
reminding me of the rain
and that the rain means so little
without its memory.
When it rains, I sense him somewhere close,
reminding me to see that it’s only raining
until the sunshine floods and speaks so true.
Rain or not, I’m glad I’m here with you.

Autumnal

So this is a marriage!
Lightness and darkness intertwined
with caustic wit,
erasing all that dangles by a golden thread.
So easy what is thine
to duck into a world of mimes
never singing at all
or even nodding along in time.

So this is October!
Leaves slipped from once-green canopies
drifting down from their boughs.
And skies go greyer,
and the sun parts earlier,
and the chill in the air
like a subtle acupuncture,
to heal in all from without, within.
So simple go the days.

And so here comes Christmas.
Yes, the only thing distant-
the feel of warmth’s embrace.
A call on the wind streaks impressions
on my soul.
My mind gimps onward
yet gathers what is sure to soil
serpents on opposite poles.
To step softly into death
and go laughing.

Rural

It is irritating to recall my hometown.
Like a cause and effect puzzle–
Where were you when, and then
What happened?
Rural Ohio isn’t much to discuss.
It is open fields of soy and sod,
It is gamesmanship with guns.
It is a small child,
Who looks younger than his age,
Learning to shave at 12
And dance at 16.
My hometown remains unchanged
Through it all.
The skies reach far
But they can’t see the corpses.

Ohio is filled with the dead,
My dead.
It is my Father fast asleep
With his right hand resting in
The sign for I Love You.
It is my mother and her tears
And our laughter through it all.
Ohio is a fading memory,
An outline of a house
With captions on its lawn.

Chatham was and is a ghost
Of some shortened depiction of sawdust and grit.
It is people speaking with southern accents.
Brother!
We have no accent,
It is studied.
It is true.
But talk like you want to.

Chatham is my classmates whispering.
Do not debase my struggle
Even if you can’t see it.
My struggle reaches back through Chatham, Ohio
And into infinity.
My struggle pulls me forward
Through clouds
Of pot smoke
And
Daily hits of
Zyprexa.
My struggle is the
Poles of the mind
Twisted from nights spent alone.
My struggle is a lasting faith
Forever left to be undone.

Ohio, you are cold and ancient.
Your politics resign
To be just a flickering of caustic wit
Breathless and benign.
Ohio, you make each return
A drift through the pathetic.
And yet with family still there,
Enriching Ohio’s present,
I visit,
And stare into Chippewa Lake
Until it quivers.

Listen With Headphones, Between The Notes

Out July 12, 2019

This album was born on the streets of Queens. I’ve been in New York for only two and a half years, and already I am a changed person. Am I a New Yorker? I dunno. Probably not. But this is a New York record.

It’s about aging, I guess. But aging in the sort of, still growing up, still coming of age way. I’m thirty, going on thirty-one. I have more life experience than most of my peers. I’ve been in and out of sanity, in and out of hospitals. To four different states in the union, seeing bits and pieces of what each can offer. I was never interested in a place quite like I am in New York.

But I misspeak, truly. My interest in New York is surface level. But I fall in love with certain parts of the city for strange reasons. Especially because I never know where I am in New York unless I knew where I was going. But I can get around on the urine-soaked, rat-infested death traps we humbly call the train. And whatever. I’ve never known where I am, not even in Cleveland. Almost never ever have. It’s never seemed all too important. I float around. I boggle.

This record is also about being raised Catholic. Through the years, I have grown a romance for being Catholic, confirmed and all, even though I resisted at the time, as a sixteen year old told to place himself in the arms of the Lord. And how. I like it now, to a certain extent. There’s a poetry in true Christianity. And I connect with it a great deal.

That’s not to say there isn’t just as much to love about Islam, or Judaism, etc. It just doesn’t matter in my context, ’cause I’m a Catholic. This record explores what that might mean.

Musically, this is a focused affair. Call it what you will, this is folk music. This is protest music. This is music with a point, I think. Regardless of what you pronounce to be a songwriter’s duty to himself and to music, it is to an over-arching theme that I tend to draw from my own music, at least, that some situations are inherently problematic.

Even still, this record is also about Donald Trump. How could it not be? But it isn’t overt, not in the naming of names, though I do have a lyric which goes “Oh my Donald, you’re a clown / Unwillin’ to paint his face frowned.” That’s about the sort of thing you’ll get from me. It’s tough to write a pop song – because this is also pop music – about the United States having concentration camps. That sort of bullshit is reserved for normal life. And fuck that shit, to be true. I just can’t think of how to do what I know needs done. So I vote. I write songs on my guitar.

These are also very much guitar songs. I explore my love of guitar in the layers you hear on each track. Some tunes have five or six guitars on them, each performing their own little roll. There’s also a piano song near the end of the album. And interesting percussion throughout.

Nine songs. Here’s the tracklist:

1. One More Pack of Smokes
2. In Heaven’s Light ‘Til Sunset
3. Dig a Porchlamp
4. Have My Cigarette Lit
5. To Paint His Face Frowned
6. Alright In Queens
7. Still I Don’t Shiver
8. Rags To Riches
9. It Isn’t Very Difficult

When You Turn To Me

When you turn to me, I sense a draft upon the acres.
I see a fragrant mirror across the lake.
When you turn to me, there is a structure.
I can’t begin to glance its shape.
When you turn to me, my eyes go drifting,
Sifting through the rakes.
And when you turn to me, my widow’s peak
Goes cryptic like a snake.

When you turn to me, my open smile
Delivers for us bland desires.
My idle mind goes lighted
And the crimes of christ go mighty,
Falling just beyond my reach.
If you’d learn, I might well teach.
But ancient darknesses go shrouded
And never understood to pout, his
Sermons don’t go shimmied,
They go shaking from their reach.
When you turn to me, my back goes spasm.
When you turn to me, I’ll preach
That only patterns do go famously,
You’re right to patter out.
When you turn to me, I’ll say to sing
Without the weight of doubt.