Tag Archives: writer

Bandcamp Friday

This is a picture of me letting you know that this Friday, March 3rd, is Bandcamp Friday, meaning that by purchasing a download of any of my releases, or a CD copy of the albums Need Something and/or Paper Glasses On, all profit will skip past Bandcamp’s share and go straight to me. I’m currently composing a new LP, compiling a hardcover copy of my collected lyrics, and writing a series of scripts–and am also shopping my new album and a completed feature. All proceeds will help offset costs of proofs, submissions, etc. So if you’ve ever thought about buying something, this Friday is a good day to do it.

If you want a taste of anything before you buy it, most of my music is wherever you listen to music online (search The Supposed So), and you can always stream the whole shebang on Bandcamp before you buy it (thesupposedso.bandcamp.com). You can also read a whole host of work on my website (which you’re on), including a couple dozen essays and the aforementioned screenplays (links above).

Anyway, that’s enough self-promotion for one day. I hope you’re making your way through winter with your head up as high as you can muster.

Thanks all.

New Fiction Out Now!

All His Consternation

It’s not uncommon to deny
the pasture played and out of sight.
Without a daring act of life,
what are you doing?
I’ve been a house with melted walls.
I’ve been the basement cold and dark.
I’ve been a door without a lock.
And I’ve been looking

for a way in,
an unforthcoming path to spin,
a dogged absent curfew of the mind.
I am a give and take,
a desperate look to apathy,
a potion boiled over
as your life’s at stake.
Come see me look up.
Come see my old platonic self.
Come hear me scream no conversation
to the clouds.

Oh darling, won’t you sit?
Take a pull from the bottle marked gin.
Take a clear exaggeration
and lay it on the cursed and dying kids.
For christ’s sake! The moon shifts,
and I howl through the gaps in the cliffs.
And I can spell it out for ya, baby.
I’m exactly where I’ve been:
Down a river up and dammed
where a while seems infinite.

So hold me now.
We’ll find out
what breathes in,
what breathes out.

But right now, all I know is
you gotta play the game.
You gotta compare every name
of yet another older white man
blindly missing all the plagues.
And the taste of blood
could never make him form a flood.
Attacking all his consternation,
call in some back up.
‘Cause my fingers crack and bend
for every dollar that I spend.
I swear I’m just sitting here on the sofa
as I watch my wallet thin.

So pack up.
We’re staying.

Reach For Sorries

Think about a thing worth thinking about
and travel into your mind,
where you’ll find some wants and needs
and little else but worthless rhymes.
My head is on your shoulder.
No, my heart is on your sleeve,
racking up a sort of mystical fight
just like David and his giant,
named to show how big he could be
if ever there was a light on
to show everyone what he’s made of.
Still, he loses every time he’s read,
a pebble to the face could shed
some much needed soul in the clouds.
And David,he’s still around
basking in a victory
now centuries old.
Now sometimes he finds himself
just doing what he’s told
with no rebellion in the fold.
No soldier for the world no more.
No, now he’s wearing thin.
Like a dog he sheds and winces
at the sound of passing airplanes.
Surely one could take his eyes.
Surely one could snap his spine.
Surely the pilot has a plan
to revenge old Goliath.
Maybe now.
Maybe David’s all alone
because he twisted the plot.
No warrior can bear to be forgot.
Even when his memory rots
and shudders from his neighbor’s gardens
that he somehow never noticed.
Funny how we see some things in
different ways as time goes on.
My loveliness is shifty, I suppose.
My kindness has its limits.
My understanding drifts from claim to claim
and I’m not for a minute insipid.
And I haven’t been.
I’m as stable as a mule,
though all roped up and doused in fuel
to be aflame with nervous ticks and
subjective subatomic guilt and
the worry that the ticking clock is
everything to the story.

And I’m not sorry for the way I feel,
the books I read or
the soil I steal to
fashion semi-hydroponic apparatus
I used to grow a little faster.
You’re 32, you say.
Just ask what the fantasy proclaims.
And name yourself as David.
Laugh and scream and say,
“Take me as I am:
“Nothing if not a helpless little man.
“Nothing if not a shame.”
Reach for sorries.
Take the blame.

Title

It’s hustle to bustle beneath drainpipe sewers.
And nothing but nothing could trade steaks for their skewers.
My mind’s indecision comes couth in the mirror
but no one else knows what insanity incurs.
It’s too intrepid to dream
and too strange to differ.

Yet so goes the stripes of cloth,
dingy and dirged
through their penchant to saunter
both trite and disturbed.
As a combat zone winks at the world back at home
’til a drift of contrition goes weak at their nose.
Still, table teeth smile their pearly white bones
on a crowd of deplorables gagged with hormones.
‘Cause nothing but fewer could mean rats under molehills
built by antagony
droplets of steam
set by angles of brawn and brine
from angels of time after time
and the time after that time that speaks under dawns.
My insolence begs you for sure.
But crafts of the plagues go for dollars and purse.

A Drift of Contrition

Why do my eyes deceive me? he asked.
What are the tides going to bring?
Where does the stretch of the canyon
meet animals, and birds on the wing?
Do such stipulations reek of deception?
Have the contents of reality sworn to be lost to time?
I imagine a drift of contrition,
before landlocked insanity felled
and we went blind.
Blind to the falling stone.
Blind to the worry wart.
Blind to the faithful and god-fearing.
Blind to the worship at midnight.
Blind to the daily prayers, repeated
without consciousness.
To the regretful actions and the outright sinfulness.
I doubt you bring cards to the table of god.
I bring cigarettes and a stoner’s guilt.
You bring coffee breath and flagrant lies.
You bring idiocy.
And what else?
Time will only tell us.
Time will, surely.

And surely, what with time as a whole,
in step with a continuum and a drunken spine,
do the ides of April go tumbling into May.
And the flowers burst like eggshells
and the leaves grow overnight.
And the grass gets greener,
and it’s mown sometimes.
However we are, with or without labor,
it is the temperance of being together
that goes slipped into dancing at dawn.
I wake and am perfectly calm.

So for goodness go forsaken
with a riddle at your side,
a sandwiched rock and hard place
you’ve gotten stuck between.
See neither one
while laying on the wall.

Nature’s Slow Resolve

Oh to work without escaping
into brilliant light, forgiven
by a candle’s wick.
Oh to treat afternoons like
stark white gloomy skies
are nothing but a shield
for the sunshine.
I cover my eyes.

Laugh like you were born smiling,
try to reach God with every grin,
with your cheeks tucked in.
With your railroad sins
hidden by tired sacks of dawn.
I’ve coffee then gone.

Please deny no passage
to a riddle on the beach,
like pleasure in the pulpit
was a sideways reach to heaven,
lowercase inside my mind.
I kick and scream in 4/4 time.

Lie under a whippoorwill
and tease the branches well
until the leaves tickle your ankles
and you cry from giggling.
Nature’s slow resolve
seeps through your skin.

But Not All Too Real

Have a way with wonder
and go grazing past the fields
of green. They are vast and
without scope, you said, and they’re
nothing if not lost to the past.

Funny how the tinkered tailored soldiers spied.
Wouldn’t you think the aim would be to stay
as far away from danger as you can?
I hole up and my whole self is calmed a bit.
At least until I read the news and it all becomes
all too real.
But not all too real
because I can stay in my apartment
and go places that are safe
for me,
a white man.
Stupid.
How odd
that history
should paint
this present.
I look at my skin
and see nothing special
at all.
At all.

My Oh My, This Place

Inspire me
Desire me
Require all my love
I’ll do it purposefully
Undoubtedly
Like a moth to the sun
Before the world lit up like madness
To a fantasy clutched like teddy bears
Oh teddy boys who party on
In working class duds
Boots of phony leather
Worn and weathered
Like the lines on their gums

Organically
You fascinate me
You’re more than I can judge
You are constantly
So lovely
I stare off into space
I can only sometimes think that way
It’s the position of the head
That helps me to say
Something
Anything

My oh my this place
It’s practically perfect in every way

Nevertheless

There is an indecisive man of goodness
who dances on the lawn.
High above his standing person
is the kingdom of God.
Yet the doctor is puzzled
and the leaders subsist
on creating danger in the heavens
with a rod or a fist
or a submachine gun,
or riot gear and tear gas to attack our lungs further.
It seems new war crimes –
amidst a new disease,
and a new stupidity
that don has evil-done –
are played out.
People are dying.
People are crying out
for a little guidance,
a little know how.
Not a play for cheap laughs.
Not insanity on no one’s behalf.
Oh where does the path lead?
Can I retrograde all my confessions
for the sins of a few thousand?
My head spins.
But words persist.

Rainstorm

Just a little better now.
Just a little simpler,
a little more meaningful.
It’s that it almost didn’t happen.
It’s that we were almost left alone
to be shivered by the lightning strikes,
to be arranged into the clouds.
Thunder.
Thunder.
Thunder.

The Perfect Guide To Rattled Swords

Distract no differences regarding indolence of seated sins.
Beget no patient sky’s inception on a whirlwind.
The mountains call to me
and I’ve not seen them in some years, you see.
I’m just a passing gaze upon a side street.
No shivering deception casts a net.

A package was delivered but it didn’t arrive.
Just like Indiana Jones with his Holy Grail eyes.
My separate need to sink into the grass blades
is like Nora Jones singing about the blues greats.

Pleasure is a pattern twisted.
Pain is something more.
It is the perfect guide to rattled swords.
It is a back porch.
It is a nice space.
It is cold drink.
It is a familiar face.

Pain is just pleasure flipped.
I feel them both each day
and moreso when the weeks stretch out
then slip away.
I’m happy now
but freaked the fuck out–
just not enough to scream from the fire escape.
Not enough to hear some voices swayed.
Not enough to stare down strangers
until I’m sure they’ll go the fuck away.

My pills wrap me up and warm me.
My pills wrap me up and warm me.
My pills wrap me up and warm me.

They Don’t Strive For Sainthood

What was once disregarded as trivial
is now touched by the hand of a serial criminal
lost amidst side streets trembling.
It is no more a canyon of dreams
than a patchwork of a cavalry,
tepid
tried
true.

And what portions of privacy
can be pleasing to the aristocracy?
I wonder.

Still there is nothing to fear but the fear of fear.
Seeds of a sentient ghost
will shiver
on pillows of black smoke,
on faint wisps of wokeness,
on crass waves of grain,
on shaking window panes.

There is much to be known
about the living alone
that is lost to the doldrums
of time.

So tidy up homes
and want no other.
As if a house is a kaleidoscope
painted over shutters.
True, there’s no one out there
worth seeing.
They don’t strive for sainthood.

Even in Darkness

From the foundation on up
to the rooftops,
my dear,
we are rattled with private planes
and suits on.
Where will a monument
capture the wild
when insanity brims from a heart racing?

It is played,
undone like an eagle identity shouldered.
No contempt for the wind.
Feel it play ’round your skin.
Feel it play ’round your eyes
’til you’re crying from laughter and built up
like a house which was once a metaphor for a heart.
Otherwise simply ascertain a percentage of canopy whistles.
My brain shorts.

Continue in earnest.
Watch sports.
Hug who is dear to you.
We’ll all die from something.
And no one knows when.
And I’ll tell you in confidence,
it is neither here nor there how I go out.
I could crack my skull,
I could scream and shout
’til my throat’s sore.
I bury tides with sand
gone
rushed away.
Even in darkness
the lights lead me astray.

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)

Michael Timothy McGuire

words and music