Blarney Stone

A poem in the tradition of Joyce

Me own midder beclimbed by rigadoons
Develop inert vellow miscreation 
And I amidst the melt of marrow and wilk 
Quaffolded enter dicter castle clamber.
For to see and kiss to mouth and bruise
And ballow merry fingers to tender touch
Pilated under brass and castle specks
Pillowing riots of queued contemporaries
After glowing chambers took to valley.
And at the highest tower came the mulley 
Milky mellow madder making music
To pile file down down down into bedded
Posture, pink lips pursed to pillow a gift
That swell falee fallah fallingering child
To cave to come to clean to empty all
The flues of flack and flunging flannel
Flattery soon to sump and scump and jump
And chump to wafe and worf high in the sky,
Black arrow drenched with lunar blood
My gift, my gab, my garb, my gard, my gall
My call, my cowl, my keel, my peel, my heel.

The Walking Tour #2

A poem

At the town of Cashel
We make camp on our pilgrimage to the homeland
And ascend the mountain to the Rock there
To witness transfiguration

And at the summit we face the enemy:
Toll booths, rope barriers, profane historians in uniformity
Scrambling, their digital payment system went offline
And now tourlings huddle around the tour mother
Awaiting further directions; and here I breach from the flock,
To the welcome of a new day.

Wandering through the open chapel of ancient stone,
I am a friar lost in psalmody,
Among a hoarse and tottering choir, our voices thrown
Up into the whipping wind, wind peeling across 
My tonsured crown, here in this holy upper room;
And in a gated and pitted cell on the northern front, I am a prisoner
Hard wood heart staggering to breathe
Under the weight of intercessory prayers,
Angels’ wings like anvils betray judgement;
And strolling through the grounds pebbled with epitaphs
I am a vessel, a glowing conduit
Well-oiled in the currents of grace,
Whispered prayers most efficiently distributed, turning
Through a wheel of beads that chime against brown lapel.

And sinking back into sense knowledge,
The mob’s mutterings gathering into earshot,
I am a young man in the 21st century,
Descending from the mountain of transfiguration,
To a world far more brutal and pragmatic;
Yet I descend reassured, knowing again that this time is as the past
And that past is as present as ever, cycles upon cycles.

The sleeping plane

A poem

suspended in the dark entirely

the plane is a long exhale

deafening to the naked ear

and inside the cabin, dim lights

hover over packed sleeping bodies

wrapped in warm blankets 

some appear nearly dead, still and wrapped in the dark

others twitch about like electrified frog legs

and a queue of noises can be heard

though only with a bit of attention

the soft creak of a chair, then the quiet rustle of plastic wrap

then a soft cough, then two voices murmuring illiterately

how soft everything is, in how dark

and empty a place; this tube of white noise paste

throttling at unimaginable speed in the dark

and in this warm aluminum bath

brief and stilted from the back of the dim cabin

a child screams

Saint John #2

A poem

O Foghorn City,
It pains me to see that the melancholy
Reciprium I’d once prized in you
Has been as fleeting as it was within me,
And having sprinted from my bitter solipsism,
Emerging like a grotesque, slimy infant,
Now I see you in fullest colour:
A horrid gray.

O Vestige of the past and of the future,
Of Protestants and Catholics divided to natural conclusion
You can’t outpace with change your own substance, I think
As I pass through streets noticing the superficial changes:
A fresh coat on an old house on Orange Street,
New pavement on Sydney, a demolition lot
I’d seen before, now from a new angle;
Raze it, raze it, O Saint John, and intercede for us.

O Home of the Aryans no Aryan dares to remember,
Your blood has run thin and frail, such
That even the hopes of darker men spill over into my spirit,
A spark, flickering, quickly extinguished
By the overflowing Reversing Falls;
And my eyes are again left to swim
Over sidewalks scattered with shed skins, agitated statues,
Women hardly compelling enough to rape.

Yet this pilgrimage has lasted a day and a night;
Through places I’ve never known, I’ve travelled
To reach this shrine of identity,
This place where I will return again and again;
Is it possible that I may never see the rest?
That all loves and charities will find their apex here,
And the Lord will win, in this place I will one day lose?

I wonder, as the beckoning of some limp hand
A stranger croaking from his deathbed
Leads me back to my carriage, to move;
And I will drive over gray and saltless roads
To meet the old parish priest in the confessional
At Holy Family Church, and make my most pitiful confession,
Here in this destitute city: crimeless,
Weatherless, prideless, priceless, 
Saint John.

BoyTimeBand

A career-spanning review in the style of Piero Scaruffi

Larkin’s Classics (2016) – 6.5/10
Super Dusty (2017) – 5/10
Super Sweet (2017) – 6/10
Super Sexy (2018) – 6/10
Super Bouncy (2019) – 5/10
Super Lonely (2019) – 7/10
I’m Good How are You (2020) – 3/10

BoyTimeBand, a pop group formed in Victoria, British Colombia by vocalists Adonis Johnson and Larkin Wallbank-Hart (as well as the elusive producer Sam), debuted in 2017 with the awful single “Town Square”. At the time, Larkin has already released two excellent singles, collected on Larkin’s Classics (2016): the infectious, Caribbean-tinged swing of “Freaky Fresh”, and the ridiculous house-inspired “The Cat Fell Down”. Both songs unleash his extraordinary talent for pairing irresistible hooks with absurd lyrics to create maximal amusement.

Super Dusty (2017) feels exactly like what it is: a group of high schoolers fooling around with audio software. The production never achieves the styles it emulates, only hints at them; the lyrics are rarely funny, only eyebrow-raising. “Care Bear City” boasts a celestial hyper-pop beat but ends up going nowhere. “Love at First Fight” has its dreamy moments but can’t find a melody to settle on. Songs like “Gospel to My Car”, “Dance with Me” and “Deep Sea” reach new levels of vapidity, with the two “personalities” simply muttering random phrases over elementary instrumentals for several minutes. 

Occasionally the confusion transforms into accidental brilliance: “Grab my Cat” (with Adonis’ sensual vocals and a stomach-churning chorus) and “Big House” (club beat with a Captain Beefheart-esque accordion) are beyond puzzling, bordering on Lynchian horror. “I Feel So Close” is the exception to the rule, pairing a skittering, martial drum with a radiant, matutinal chorus; the song also features one of Larkin’s most evocative lines (“The cats are making out / In the alley tonight”). The piano ballad “Folded Mattress” offers some intrigue with its strange melody, and the closing track, “Move Your Hips”, premieres the band’s trademark multi-phase arrangement. But it’s too little, too late. The boys don’t really know how to make a proper song yet.

Later that year, the band released Super Sweet. With only four songs (including one cover), the group exchanges distracted quantity for focused quality. “10 I See”, despite its patently lame refrain, is nonetheless significantly more memorable and fluid than most of Dusty. “The Girls in the Country”, with its infernal banjo and goofy vocal manipulations, is pure foolishness. “Movie Star” is built on a single refrain (“I’m a movie star”), repeated ad nauseum over a stressful alternation between club beat and sinister ambience. For better or worse, this song effectively reinvents Pink Floyd’s “Bike” for the internet age.

Four more songs appear on Super Sexy (2018), where the band properly introduces their melancholy side (“Beautiful Flame”). “Young Love”, another schizophrenic song whose misty, tragic verse switches into an epileptic frenzy (“Yummy, yummy in my tummy!”) is perhaps the first towering achievement of the collective's career. The aggressive mumble-rap “Bad Boy” and the disgusting “Cheated on Your Wife” demonstrate how far they’ve come from their pointless debut.

Super Bouncy (2019) emulates the pop music of the day. “My Wife” parodies every radio hit of the late twenty-teens, while “Access” parodies Drake in particular. “Our First Time” features sitar and flute over an AWOLNATION “Sale”-esque beat. “Christmas Love” imitates Travis Scott’s trap with an eerie atmosphere. Unfortunately, in refining their songcraft they greatly dampen their charming, wacky energy; compared to the debut, the music is now eminently listenable but contains none of the highlights.

Super Lonely (2019), the band’s longest and most ambitious album, is their masterpiece. Not only has the production become far more polished, but the two charismatic vocalists manage to find an equilibrium of personality: by largely funneling Larkin’s role into the hooks (where he seems most comfortable), Adonis’ sincerer nature now adds a gravitas to the entire tracklist, contributing to an overall “professionalism” not present before.

With this new confidence, they lay down some of the strongest tracks of their career: the chilling and dreamy “Over the Harbour” soars like a drone above the city lights; the smooth, erotic, and shocking R&B of “Not Selfish” rivals Frank Ocean or D’Angelo; the nocturnal pulse and timeless refrain of “Marshgello” boasts Larkin’s most effortless rap verse; “Lonely Interlude” moves from a hazy, ambiguous ballad into a distorted and epileptic drop, from there morphing into nightmarish hallucinations. “Mine Games” harks back to the old days of Larkin’s domineering madness; a zany and stylish beat, mindless chatter, earth-shattering switch-ups, and a magnificent sax solo make this song more than worthy of Larkin’s Classics.

It is, however, Adonis whose persona now looms over the proceedings. His is an obsessive, loitering spirit, with a hint of tragedy – although always boyish enough to be dismissed for a laughable hook. He intones the celestial and moody “Stars” with the tremendously romantic line “I love you, forever” while the others make a ridiculous show; he brings down the house on the hard rocking “Cutie” and drones hypnotically over the intensely psychedelic “Recorded Overdose”. He pens his personal, tragic manifesto on the otherwise generic “What He Wants” (“Adonis wants to love”).

There are weak points, however: “On This Love Sack” regresses into the frustrating aimlessness of Dusty; “Little Old Sammy” never comes to fruition (its hilarious chorus notwithstanding); “High in Love” ranks among their most passable songs; and, despite its dramatic pretense and occasional catharsis, the closing track “I’ll Still Wait” does nothing to justify its fifteen-minute length. 

Between the band’s slow, taciturn soul and the number of minor tracks, the album is difficult to stomach in a single sitting. Nevertheless, its moments of convergence are worth replaying long after most other pop music has been forgotten.

Larkin is nowhere to be found on I’m Good, How Are You (2020), an aggressively boring album that consists of Adonis whining over leftover beats. It is an injustice to the name of BoyTimeBand, destined to be no-listener music.

Best songs:

1. Young Love
2. Lonely Interlude
3. Movie Star
4. Mine Games
5. Not Selfish
6. I Feel So Close
7. Grab My Cat
8. Marshgello
9. Stars
10. Care Bear City

PSA

It's been two years since my last post and a lot has changed. Most pertinently, my ways of thinking and of writing. I've gone ahead and deleted most of my posts, keeping only the ones that I think have a bit of creative writing with a sense of charm, or ideas with potential for future elaboration. Posts exhibiting beliefs that I hold most dearly have also been deleted, as there's no sense keeping them here, written in such an unattractive and (therefore) inappropriate form.