WW?B | Why Write? Blog

Big Black - Heartbeat (Wire cover)          

SONG OF THE DAY: Too Drunk To Fuck by Nouvelle Vague

The Art of Embellishment

Here’s an outstanding rendering of the Dead Kennedys’ classic Too Drunk To Fuck by Nouvelle Vague.

And some fuckers say beauty is dead.

SONG OF THE DAY: Aftermath by The Cowboys International

Steven Jesse Bernstein - This Clouded Heart

Is Bernstein’s writing “beat” or “beat-up” poetry? Perhaps, it is punk poetry at its best form.

Marrying music to poetry is far from being a novice idea, but only a handful of artists were really able to tie the two art forms successfully and fully expand them in a great way. If anyone did it, it certainly was Steven Jesse Bernstein.

Bernstein was a punk-man-of-letters trying to bring the aesthetic of DIY to poetry. He was one of the many “Men who look confused, like fish getting clubbed on the pier” rambling about dispersed and squandered under the scorching sun.

Bernstein was a man with a heart equally jam-packed with beauty and ache and his poetry did indeed show him as he truly was. 

AL

~

This Clouded Heart

This clouded heart where the rain begins and the traffic dies.

We cry a little because of the bricks showering from the broken buildings, the windows divided into pieces of pictures, the incomplete dirt and sallow gardens.

There is a girl, she doesn’t know what her breasts are for and holds them up curiously with her fingers. Her eyes are two wagons gone off down different sidewalks pulled by boys with playing cards in their pants, who can’t read their hands, who’s goodbye mouths sail higher and higher. The soles of their shoes are virgins.

This is a neighborhood of padded mud, wheels gone all the way, kisses like the electric wires inside eels, nervous knives, pretty pistols, mothers, gods, fathers, cops, leaning with shame. The deteriorated winter is yellow and its cruel dust is everywhere, on the handlebars, stair rails, steeples, old broken off rooftops that smell like moldy sausage. The boys shake out their cards in the dark but there is only one girl in the whole city and she is pregnant. All have the same mother, went on the same vacation, father toot-toot like oranges against the skyscraper; could be that man, could be that one.

An avalanche of fathers that kill you with snakes, with beliefs that are the invention of snakes. Here is an eye and here is an eye, this one watches you and this one watches you. You feel that you are watched when you are private. Even when you are not private you cannot chose your audience. You feel that everything you do is pornography. Mother cries, father slaps and punches the beliefs explained, and the buildings where it is explained all stink and are filled with slippery objects that you can not touch.

You are so nasty you go to the psychologist’s office, take your pants down, and look up there with a visionary stethoscope, and give you plastic chewing gum to mutter the pain. The Avon Lady eyeglasses through the windshield, shirt button mouthed, cleavage like a holocaust. Some place you look down sick for your own good. Make-up time in school. Lipstick and fingernail polish on a corpse. Look in the dummy box, there are two wet breasts and an ace of diamonds and a five. The nipple is made of straw like a doll nipple, dry and sweet. Give her your cigarettes, your silver star of David, your ancient ridicule that hackles over the fences that surround and divide history into ghettos and she will fuck you on the newspaper with the cat shit and motoroil, give you an even break where there used to be just shatter lines in your cement. “There is a girl in there,” you swear and we swear in memory.

Look down where they poured the basement floor, the landlord watching, looking at the electric clock, listening, saying, “Too much talk here,” counting and counting to ten, which is all you need to know to count to a million. He watches them and we watch him, “There is a girl down there,” we whisper. He glasses in my shirt in a string, beating like a heart against the skin, and she can’t see no more. Counts to a million and goes to his cars, writes “One Million” on a piece of paper and drives away with millions on paper. You fucking phony genie, give me my wish! Under the auditorium stairs this time, and no bullshit - show up this time or I’ll swipe your glasses and never give ‘em back! “She’s got something to cry about,” they say at the pop stand, “Made her do pornography to pay the rent. She got a skin disease on her pussy, they turned off the heat, and her baby froze on the rug furniture leg, stuck in it like a blue popsicle. And toys all over, sold ‘em back to the store for batteries for the radio, to hear where the food bank is.” Shannondoa playing like mice through the wall, onion skin propeller twirling in the gray light bulb, and oh it’s gonna get dark. Does the sun shit on their roof? I got a hammer lock pencil sharpener you can use in a fight. Got her on the stairs and I’ll trade you. Shut the basement floor over her for a million, all the walls are covered with pictures already of her and me and you, fucking each other all day, every day and the cars and the vans going in and out.

The cops taking away the night for something it did. Shatter lines across the moon where it used to shine. Heaven up in jail, God splintered by bars, drinking out of the toilet in San Diego, saw him through the little window and he had no more money. Gave him my cigarettes and silver star of David. On a wet afternoon, almost got run over going from the jail to the bail bond and still they wouldn’t take nothing I had, my run- over self, five lucky cards, sex, green job - “Never heard of a poor Jew,” they said, and threw everything on the floor. “My dad’s in there, he’s like God to me! My God’s in there he’s like a dad to me!” “Well, give him all your cigarettes,” they said, and he did time and got raped by guards and prisoners, got knifed and kicked the shit out of, went in the hole for five months, three weeks, did not cry for nine years which is almost a million. And next time the land lord smiled was when they took the furnace out and everyone had to get their own heat. You got an eye on your hooligan and I know your breadbox is on fire and the panties was oozing milk but the tracks on your arms talk right into the walkie-talkie. Squad cars fall right out of the sky to see it.

Angels of hysteria, tattle-tale virgins with nothing to tell whistle in their once bright air, where now just bricks fly, where once was a bird or two. Oh, Mama, get me a plane ticket out of here! Oh, Mama, put me on a bus! Oh, Mama, get Daddy out of jail! How come the hole in the roof isn’t big enough so I can fly out but it’s big enough so the rain can get in? And I saw you in the picture and I saw you in the picture and I’m not too young or too dumb to know what you was doing in the picture! I saw you in my clouded heart.