An Evening with the Clarity

Saturday, June 25th 2011 – 7:30PM

Howmet Playhouse, Whitehall MI

Music:

The Great Unknown

Singing in the Abbey

Fred Thomas

Readings:

John Hemingway

Michael Tyrell

$2 Microbrews

Tickets are $10.00 and are available here or by calling 231.670.7033

 

Credit Cards Accepted

Single Ticket (1) $10.00

Continually, as October weeds out the majority of false Edens, the hollow Eve finds us sweet teeth bobbing for apples. Scratch us so we can start over, so we can turncoat through iron-maiden turnstiles. Crosstown ride where the Lord give uth and take uth away, flasher whose jimson got jammed in slamming doors. We might miss an apocalyptic eclipse, but the river-frontiers burst in the Eerie Canals. House and Garden Reader’s headphones corkscrewed as snakes whisper out, get the hell.

With you, hushed pal, in hideous library atrium in winter. Your winter not my hypothermia, your changed-topic hush not my silent treatment, your engine not my station. Thank you, powerless chum, maybe I’m sorry? Only a leather couch we sit on, not the blood ox skinned for it, only the army of bookworms murmuring through metal detectors and not a pack for a lover to cut a rival from. Returned volumes thud in their aluminum bin: not a crypt. No references to leapers from the balcony who’ve expired on these tiles, weather’s our only prophecy. Scrubbed of metaphors, your equable glance tells me zilch about gore absorbed from a floor or face. Ally whose exit never cracked the ticker, no one I know’s violence gets stored up to make spring’s rising temps, relationship’s put out-eyes, lit’s scorched Petrarchan martyrs. Pulp bibles and best cellar gods, how will you ward off my fever and braille?

I’m stuck again, not bleeding like a stuck pig but waiting
for results in the HMO waiting room, stuck
where praying is more counting than praying.

The mother puts her finger to her small lips, quieting her small boy.
Her small boy locks his lips with the invisible key, drops it to the floor.
Keep your eyes peeled, my mother once told me.

Bug-gut smeared on the leaves of Prevention, the crossword done.
Rolled up my sleeve and made a fist some time ago and soon blood
will have the last word. The whitewashed nurses becoming

the results, any minute, any minute. Not yet. Not for me.
I could pick up the invisible key from the floor. The
waiting room like an audition where hopeful actors go

but there’s not a part for everyone, in the future.
I could have a life, I could stop reading pulp crime.
I could adopt some kids and keep them from literature.

Goodnight, moon; goodnight, noises, noises everywhere.
I could worsen: the radio tells who’s done for,
weather comes on the ones. At home, I’ve got pounds of cure,

pounds of prevention. Civic-minded clod,
I’ve already willed my eyes, no, my
ears. I still know a beautiful word:

Luminol, for the chemical that makes blood glow.
All parts spare parts.
I could stop watching those crime shows.

Lady Macbeth knew what was permanent: evidence.
What a relief not to hear my own blood, surging inside.
Let it stay in, I pray to the Lady of Evidence.

But the shows strangle every channel, the radio
tells who’s done for. I’m safe and that means
someone’s not. My name comes, the nurses follow.

I could leave the results, not know.
In a tidy home somewhere smelling of bleach
the walls and floors begin to glow.

The tuxed-up drunk, trembling the dorm’s lobby window
when a bottle tipped him over. His squint not at me but past me
to the one hundred keys glittering behind my post,

the check-in desk, where all summer, I worked the Saturday
insomnia shift. The ruse of looking down at the marble notebook,
one-one thousand, then looking up: the drunk gone, like a movie ghost.

The prank caller, the phone a bee-sting sound.
The paper I had to write to undo my grade of “Incomplete,”
something about Eden, something to please my professor.

Tumbling from the nightclub: the samba amateurs,
some still whistling and writhing. Cigarettes cracking balloons.
Like archangels, the narcs patrolling closed Union Square.

Kamikaze, Titanic, Banshee: all the sweet nicknames I knew for heroin.
Saying them, obeying them, to feel the lull. To not feel.
The dancers whose other moves frightened me

nights I worked sober: they trashed themselves;
the place, the park, could be the garden again only if
they vanished. This much I knew about Eden.

And that I wasn’t safe: I needed to look outside.
The desk radio refreshed deaths and sped-read
the conditions—traffic and weather—

no obit could overrule.
Early morning the beautiful victim, noon the coroner.
The dancers writhed.

I was born the summer of his disgrace.
That’s always been my claim. And it’s a trait
I despise in other people: hitching the intensely personal
to the historical, making Watergate a lame pun for
passage and delivery. But my mother
insists on scandal. An unmarried mother, middle-aged—
she swears her pregnancy didn’t show, even
that morning she locked herself in the toilet
and told her own mother to call an ambulance.
The phones rang off the hook that day—everyone in the family.
If I wanted to carry this further, I could point out
my mother, like Nixon, could’ve resigned.
A childless cousin wanted to raise me, a maternal
version of a vice-president. But my mother,
a child of Roosevelt, kept me: four terms of depression
and world war. Like all children, I demanded a
recount, a new election: request denied.
Hostage faces bubbled on the television screen.
When she told me who my father was, I wanted
the mystery back—the speculation traded like
missiles between the family gossips, not a Woodward
or Bernstein among them, Deepthroat a man
on the street they couldn’t identify and who
never spoke to them.

The night of June 20th was a special one for the clarity. 350 people gathered for nearly 4 hours to celebrate beauty and drink good beer. Every performer brought it hard, and the evening became one of emotional intimacy. The small, acoustically capable theater played host to passionate artists who executed their respective talents with a candor that was truly special. We are doing this again: in New York, Chicago, and right back here at home. We are doing it for those who dance naked and pause at sunsets. And doing it for those who wish they could ventilate, but can never seem to work up the courage to defy their own conventions. But mostly, we will do this again because we feel it is imperative to manifest the clarity in the most raw and human way possible; A live show of the life show if you will.

Thank you so much again to our unbelievable performers: Karisa Wilson, Amy King, Samantha Farrell, Michael Tyrell and Judson Claiborne.

And a thank you to everyone who came out to support our journal.

Poet Michael Tyrell talks about his work, New York, and Roman Polanski. His poem Restraining Order is featured in our March 2009 issue.

A tuxedo cat’s been haunting my fire escape;
it disturbs me to realize his form is all he is, all he will ever be.

I swear, I could skin him, protect myself from all decoys,
prevent us from meeting, even in dreams, within the same 100 yards,

but no worries, I don’t need protection; you follow the law and stay gone,
as maybe you feared last year’s blizzards and that’s what kept us inside…

all that unrestraint, all that To Be Continued—
now you’re just another Where Are They Now?

Fall comes to Dyker Heights and ships in
the smoky nights I need so much, when

every breath mimics carbon monoxide
and the truest word looks combustible.