ELEGIES & THEORIES Andy Fogle

ELEGIES & THEORIES I (5 * 7)

Eric said sometimes it's a matter of finding the right container. Differences are spreading like smoke, and that's really spreading, but lemme tell you, then again it fades.

Originally over, the shining is shine, and you can't hide in the edges. They were charming in their gutterly ways, one boom-bass militantly with fingers, another picking treble brash as the knobs allow, the other jazzpunk with a spectacular clump of blond hanging like a raccoon tail over his face.

There can be breakages in any language, you know that. There is no color chosen.

Perhaps I once wrote the subject of change is a good shape. I'd prefer at least a few more girls than guys.

Water evaporates more quickly if you've got the amp cranked. The rotting smell of the pier, wood full of wormblood, tongue full of salt-mist.

There's not always joy around a table, but we can always keep our fingers crossed for the Quotation Striptease. Besides, to be whole is to be reckless.

Such reasonable crumbs and crust in the lines of our table. More than three people and a twelve-pack is a rager for sure.

 

 

The band has a green string. The disgrace is in so-ing, careless as logic wishes it could be, but it is not like anything.

Not a bit, never more than altogether. Coffee in Daddy's stomach: pra-glump, pra-glump.

More of a double. Allyne Road, Gramma's house, the two of us in the rocking chair after supper was nice like it's usually hard to say.

I don't know as much about cheap danger as the old me, but suppose, just suppose. Use it in the light of morning.

May, may. Darkness of an old penny.

Table full of wine bread oil garlic greens peppers and fish. The child was afraid of the word stomach, and dreamt his grandmother was a witch.

 

 

That was a misreading of those early bands, or maybe a correct reading of their first wave of followers—that they were "earnest." They were largely pricks just like you and me and that's part of why we love them so. The wave of black and silver feelings is a system. They need a catalogue.

How emptiness replaces substance when the thing ain't there—how can you breathe then? We're all around the table wasted.

Treasure the empty colors, hardly more than ever. No such thing as proper dinner music in my house.

Collect more trembling and not any even trembling, cause a whole thing to be a church. I won't take the breaking-bait, that's all my teenage and early twenties stuff, but if I can re-enter that space where I knew no chords and so created where to put my fingers, just made it up and got parts of songs that way and after awhile that added up to something I could call something.

Show me in the night-time. But then, the use of all things is manifold and that which is past is constant.

Electricity's meter? A line just distinguishes it.

There are no more addresses, there is no more learning. All those old songbooks with traditional hymns—nobody knows where they came from, but they're always arranged and re-arranged by somebody every so often.

 

 

Thankfully, they left me out of whatever custody hearing there was. Pick a darkness, any darkness.

Why not include things like that as supplements for a little kid learning to read? The old man put a camera around the boy's neck, said "Now you're looking like a real photographer," and they went into the zoo.

My dad says, "It's all about money" while rubbing his thumb and first two fingers together. He continues, "Money and fuckin'," and at "fuckin'" he nudges the air with his chin.

Green wine, "straw-colored," and it shows. What was the use when that asshole just wanted to trash Burroughs as soon as he had an excuse?

Any occasion shows the best way. She told me her brother was driving a two-lane back road once with his elbow hanging out the window, and a truck going the other way came by too fast and too close and lopped her brother's elbow right off (it worked for awhile).

Any saloon is well-placed. Shaving her head while smoking a joint, was this the girl for me?

The meaning of this. Astonishment of water, they stop selling beer after the 7th inning—a white light.

 

 

Asked why he skipped, he replied, "School wasn't there." Right on time, the stars have left their places—spread into nothing.

She burned all our pictures, letters, poems, trashed the mix tapes—I just put a hole in the wall. Collapsed in the stall, a cop nudging my foot with his foot, in between a place, and in the morning, walking miles back to the truck, the humid dawn air.

There wasn't much hope back then, and I just quit bothering. This is not true.

I forgot about that documentary on the history of comedy, and I forgot about the moon. What'll it be: the eclipse or the meteor shower?

I hope they have each other now. DeNiro Logic 101: This is this.

Georgie was one of the big kids (high schoolers) in the neighborhood when I was six, rang his doorbell, and he pulled back the picture window curtain with a butcher knife and smiled at me. It shows shine.

Out the door, into September, pretty much crazy with grief. Such beautiful beautiful, beautiful beautiful.

 

 

ELEGIES & THEORIES II (6 * 7)

Dawn's meaning is reddening, and I recognize a new fault. This makes sand.

The belly of summer swells and shines, and there is singing coming from the caves. Oh, very well.

The open meadow, the silence that is always there, altogether. Marvelous presentation.

Education's cobweb avalanche, sea foam on the screen in my head. A description is not a birthday (but suppose it is).

In bed while the grown-ups partied, my door wouldn't shut all the way. Dad's slinging laughter and smoke, Ma's story ending with "Fuck you!" and the up yours gesture.

Unevenness is mutual and the bedroom all that is still, while the rest of the house, although invisible from here—I can feel it rolling. Under no obligation.

Then there would be no more clatter. Uncle Johnny, Big John, found dead on the pot, days after Christmas, inside the between that is turning.

 

 

What choice is there? Grief in the mirror-steam.

Anyway, a whole sound is in an order. When his dad Red first came from Chilhowie to visit his son in Virginia Beach, they went to the ocean and Red, having lived in southwest Virginia all his life, couldn't handle the concept: "It's the end of the land, it's the end of the land..."

The more "doctor" is repeated, the longer they play the two chords, let meaning fall apart and reassemble. Forget I said that.

All this makes a harmony, it even makes a succession, but don't be so quick to use that for this. Please be responsible: on New Year's Eve, do not throw an M-80 into the street as a car approaches.

All makes like an eye, makes a search be clear. An eye during wailing, an eye in sleep.

For a brief time in my youth, I worked up to a few days of hula-hoop proficiency, and during two straight trips to Haygood Roller Rink, damn near pretty much knew what I was doing. Never again.

 The cloudiness inside the lakes he fished. Are you ready?

He gave me a hunting knife for my tenth birthday: camouflage handle with removable liquid compass cap, and inside matchsticks, other basics. The blade was thick black oily steel, and teeth on the top edge.

Let's move yesterday way way back and last week decades ahead. We'll make a better go of stumbling.

Something in the evening preserves stains. Composed and practiced, the cold is tender in its way.

No getting around simultaneous, only sparse furnishings. Through the floor vent in the bedroom I could see the family room, and dropped sunflower seeds among them.

Got cold out there, toes curled up and everything. Emerging from the quilt-crush, the hard-dawnlight air, bitter, bitter glory.

When two trucks stream by each other in the mountains, you leave the heel of your hand on the wheel, and raise your fingers in a wave to the other. Keep you beer well below windowline.

Something about all these people being solitary together. Refusal to give up cigarettes or peanut butter.

 

 

Even 300+ lb. is a little thing in the ground, far less as ash. I don't want symmetrical instructions.

No present, I said when the teacher called my name, embarrassed all the other kids said they'd brought a gift when she said their names. God, all kind of stuff of you could do with that one.

No choice but to cremate him by that time. All this makes a line.

All the suggestions you want in dissonance, just don't bother the no more. Being very little and loving fish, but scared as I sorted the bones with my tongue.

To burn the cherished, to sneer at the mountainline, to heap silence upon all that is behind. Anything decent in the house tonight?

In the wedding of shores, arrangement of pale dusk across fantasies of praise. Strong customs lose over there.

Outrageous nothingness, top to bottom, through and through the holler, joy of rooms and gurgling. It is so easy to exchange meaning, it is so easy to see the difference.

 

 

A necessity of results—blond eyebrows in the way of vision—drink's likely nope, choice of matrimony, foggy vacation. Somewhat sad in Mystic, CT, even the visit with Rita and Hector, white wine and scallop chowder, the psychiatrist is totally aware of losing his body.

Slurping out the mason jar, reliability of canes. Certain flowers alter counting.

So necessary no mistake is intended. Pockets of breeze, the robin found post-storm, open belly full of gravel.

Pliable joy, anticipation of anything, another round of retracted statements on me. Pleasant for the tongue: lakeside trout, fire's kiss, mist's surround, coffee's luscious fade in sips.

Nothing more likely than steady, no remedy in separation, oh season of manyness. The hemlocks are altered and bent.

This one’s for real: he fell asleep under the Christmas tree in ’81 putting some toys of mine together, so drunk, she says, he couldn’t hit himself in the ass with a pair of deer antlers. The color inside of shade—left anywhere.

Salt on a slug, cutting into my brain, let’s widen our selection process but narrow the search. Let us why way.

 

 

Who knows how much racist shit he believed and talked and which was which, when one, when the other, anything not to be another example. Let it strange let it strange let it strange.

No such thing as the Elizabeth River; it’s just a noise that blue lines make on paper. Tell ya, I love me some eel though, and that ain’t no lie.

It was a whole world of muck in the far corner of the backyard by the yellowtin shed and crumbly woodpile, where I turned over stumps and watched everything writhe and scuttle. This is your section, for your family and friends, to think of something that sticks for you, and to enjoy the game and all that.

How pure is the owl? How toned is the air?

It’s alright to kneel down and pray in the busy middle of a high school hallway, but it will alarm some of us. Those two, however, the ones tongue-choking each other, rubbing each other off, ready to rock in the locker if it were just a little bit bigger baby—well, they have a pass.

Sometimes it seems I haven't paid much for living wild and other times like they'll never stop taking it out of and on my ass. Minimally brazen, the hanging please,  not even close.

I love how you make noise-hooks, does that have anything to do with your upbringing, or maybe your dark-animal twenties? Occasions as ingredients, menus like decades, the answer is everything, and of course you will.

 

 

ELEGIES & THEORIES III (8 * 7)

A silence that is not centered sweetens the borders, and that’s why we have voice. A need to be in, looking for less.

Back when we lived at Cockroach Commons, were those days romantic, the worst, or one because of the other? This tune tends to ask questions, tends to wonder like that, so let us back up to basic setting: a shithole in Falls Church.

An offer is made. We never knew his name, the owner of the convenience store across the northwestern tip of Wilson Blvd., who greeted us, “How doing?” and willingly changed dollars for laundry quarters, who sold old beer, where I once bought an abacus while I was high.

To begin the placing, next door, late at night, in the Noland Kitchen Supply parking lot, Marla and I first kissed, and the earth is still scorched. Safe and sound.

Eating oranges with Dad and watching Benny Hill, a no since, a no since, a no since, but suppose we could press the oil from a secret and fry up some eggs in it. If the audience has a shape, is really so nice and sweet, you might want to go ahead and play an extra couple songs.

I don’t think that’s gonna hold for long. Even if the past is the bottom of the streambed, and this spot here is pertickly clear, we can’t know the whole stream in just one glance, so just go on the fuck back to the other Washington and forget we ever lived.

Condense the here-send, shine the shadow’s blackness-air, consider our disturbing uses. The question has to do with location vs. age, but it’s not the same thing as disappearance.

 

 

The sigher-atter of all that is is entering and exiting and entering and exiting. All the bad memories, the terrible things I've said and done, all that living with myself.

Hold me tightly to these elements: a glass half-air and half-water on a heavy, long, wooden table with light coming in the window, a breeze in the house, and faraway a dog and train. Guilt and shame are not for you, love, but for those who would have you have them.

Despite delight we wither among circumstance, and that's what I'm headed from, sudden slice of white limitation. Out of an eye comes research.

It happened in such a way that no one could remember its happening, and there was a difference between separation and desertion. This has nothing to do with you.

Harmony is so essential, said one of the hands in my head, while the other said change is charming. Every room is open.

Oh, I can see the resemblance, spittin' image, just like—. What does it really matter when our birthdates are the same but decades apart?

Doubt made the memory clear, so she continued her story. Sometimes he doubted her accuracy, or her motives, and so he remained in her stories' spell.

 

 

A silver hole in the head, that's what I need. I'm not so sure about the silence hiding things thing.

No song is sad, kids, even if it is. You know I'm legally blind, she crooned, and my vision's getting worse all the time.

All along, this thing about accuracy, noise, and periphery. Who is a man.

Kim says those J's early stuff had the hooks, but also the noise and dissonance, and all within these concise rock songs. Lanegan says sometimes a record's just a period of time.

Lou says it's just another way to go on feeling. A gesture full of resignation, and that makes the audience swoon.

Compare the piece you recognize to the piece that gets repeated into void. Suppose these two get together in the rain, and the credits' heads roll.

Certainty is the question, and that just fucks up the whole process. Fitting means failing and failing means no more letters, no more albums, no more phones that live at home, no more music from nobodies in person at the local joint with poor sound, no more of any of that.

 

 

Man, I love that "any little thing is water" part. Twinkling doesn't do it justice—the movement of a star in its stillness, the distance, dead light still alive, etc, memories' metaphor and so on, nothing innovative, but come on, we get shafted with twinkling, such a rip off word choice.

A copout to consider disorder cohesive when framed by a single mind and some playful, intuitive pairings. What's more, I kind of appreciate cohesion.

The curtains like canvas, the picture window, the square robe of caught dusklight. The trouble with losing teeth, the smell of tomato vines, thin pinch of it, white hair on it, and slowly, slowly, slowly getting into it.

I've constructed some kind of tidiness to measure mess, but feel free to destroy the whole piece, dismantle and reassemble. I bet you can make a better story anyway.

Helicopter's spotlight a tube of white dust frisking the neighborhood, looking for a runaway boy, I was told. There is no delusion, she said.

There's no such thing as ghosts. Why is there a choice?

Why is the window humming? What is the color of the air's light in a hurricane's eye?

 

 

God was it Lorene or Tim or Edward? Arrangement of lies.

I told him I hoped he would listen to this song, but when it was done, the DJ just announced the next one. Not giving it away.

The old image of a bullseye, a target, a dartboard, a Nerf hoop, the eclipse we drew the shades to in 4th grade, and all those wacky sunglasses that were in. All the time in shadows.

What if the devil comes up here sometime? Day empties its glory, and then it is twilight.

Diminishment, alleviation, useless, astonishment, repetition, fearless. He told me to keep doing what I was doing and not listen to all them.

He told me, Hey, it don't mean a thang if it ain't got that swang, and I was so flattered. There's someone behind you.

An old voice in an old room is about youth and death together. And real cadences, just in case someone calls.

 

 

Don't worry about the misquotes—they're there and that's it. It is so stairwayed, sooo insurmounted, so frayed up.

All the same, and still, did that mean you just didn't love anymore? It is mixed up with the rest of time.

Reach for the decision and light it up—soon it is ash, so use the stitches to hold the hand closed, first a few, then 7 or 8, then it's 16 when it's all over. That's another one for young and old.

Elocution, the wires of speaking—climate matters, you know how it is when you're battling the elements. An example of this is 15 years and a separation of regret.

Incalculable lights, first currents no one can manage. So thin a space, so cold is suggested, but something close too.

Vacate the premises. All the time there is music to question, all the time there is intentionality to question, and all the time there is a relationship that thrives on mutual enabling of self-destruction in different forms—1 drinking, 1 fucking—to question.

She did the driving, gave me smokes when I ran out, bought beer when I'd bought myself out, and whatever the verb means I supported her in all her revolving flings and tirades, including the whatever one with me. It's good we're done.

 

 

Terrible singing, like a bucket full of corners. In the name of no bullshit, constant bullshit between us.

Let's design a monster we don't need, and then we'll make one we do. More excellent slanted borrowing.

Very little escapes anger, love, and distraction. Order, measure, form—these have all been retrospections, so now I'll try them as triggers.

Left me there in the lamplight. Christ, what is it this time—a sickening golden sound.

Into powder, on location, under impressions, over overness.  Even the sack-problems' sources cooperated: the shit in my head with the beer in my dick (together, they got the job undone).

The child looking at clouds is involved in metaphor, and they never quite settle completely, or scatter. If I had it to do all over again.

We owe so much to what has disappeared: dead parents, before that their marriage, before that their love, virginity, innocence, what have you. And I'll never get back to Half Moon Music on 17th.

 

 

Curved examples of speech. To translate no more into the same as disappointment.

It means more than clarity, this habit of echo, this exchanging of strange, remains of the seen, shelter's show of clamor, murmuring's quit.

Not sure coordinates is the right word either—mine sure haven't been, unless Zeus and Hera and everybody really do have a gnarly action figure set-up with one a short guy gently scratching his goatee and looking at the ocean he hears in a shell.

Can you hold the door for me? Lost causes, special occasions, explicit instructions not to be mended.

We've got two more. The moon was so white it was blue, no talk to break the tension, and all I could face was that moon, and my truest replies were I don't know and ok.

That last part (of the last one) hasn't changed much, and that's one that I have a thing for, feel myself believing in, suspect might be all I really meant in the first place, but I know that such bifocality is only one of the truth's many pairs, and like a good would-be social scientist, trust more triangulation, and that's when you come in.

Sensible layers: beach-figure, ocean, sky. Pretty fountain, Daddy, pretty fountain.