8 Fragments for Kurt Cobain__Jim Carroll

8 Fragments for Kurt Cobain

1/
Genius is not a generous thing
In return it charges more interest than any amount of royalties can cover
And it resents fame
With bitter vengeance

Pills and powdres only placate it awhile
Then it puts you in a place where the planet's poles reverse
Where the currents of electricity shift

Your Body becomes a magnet and pulls to it despair and rotten teeth,
Cheese whiz and guns

Whose triggers are shaped tenderly into a false lust
In timeless illusion

2/
The guitar claws kept tightening, I guess on your heart stem.
The loops of feedback and distortion, threaded right thru
Lucifer's wisdom teeth, and never stopped their reverbrating
In your mind

And from the stage
All the faces out front seemed so hungry
With an unbearably wholesome misunderstanding

From where they sat, you seemed so far up there
High and live and diving

And instead you were swamp crawling
Down, deeper
Until you tasted the Earth's own blood
And chatted with the Buzzing-eyed insects that heroin breeds

3/
You should have talked more with the monkey
He's always willing to negotiate
I'm still paying him off...
The greater the money and fame
The slower the Pendulum of fortune swings

Your will could have sped it up...
But you left that in a plane
Because it wouldn't pass customs and immigration

4/
Here's synchronicity for you:

Your music's tape was inside my walkman
When my best friend from summer camp
Called with the news about you

I listened them...
It was all there!
Your music kept cutting deeper and deeper valleys of sound
Less and less light
Until you hit solid rock

The drill bit broke
and the valley became
A thin crevice, impassible in time,
As time itself stopped.

And the walls became cages of brilliant notes
Pressing in...
Pressure
That's how diamonds are made
And that's WHERE it sometimes all collapses
Down in on you

5/
Then I translated your muttered lyrics
And the phrases were curious:
Like "incognito libido"
And "Chalk Skin Bending"

The words kept getting smaller and smaller
Until
Separated from their music
Each letter spilled out into a cartridge
Which fit only in the barrel of a gun

6/
And you shoved the barrel in as far as possible
Because that's where the pain came from
That's where the demons were digging

The world outside was blank
Its every cause was just a continuation
Of another unsolved effect

7/
But Kurt...
Didn't the thought that you would never write another song
Another feverish line or riff
Make you think twice?
That's what I don't understand
Because it's kept me alive, above any wounds

8/
If only you hadn't swallowed yourself into a coma in Roma...
You could have gone to Florence
And looked into the eyes of Bellinni or Rafael's Portraits

Perhaps inside them
You could have found a threshold back to beauty's arms
Where it all began...

No matter that you felt betrayed by her

That is always the cost
As Frank said,
Of a young artist's remorseless passion

Which starts out as a kiss
And follows like a curse


Jim Carroll died this week in New York City. He'll be remembered and re-read as a sympathetic witness and poet of his city's underground culture. He began writing and became involved with poetry at St. Marks' Project during the late 1960's; his autobiographical book The Basketball Diaries was published in 1978 to general acclaim. In 1980 he recorded his first music album, Catholic Boy which garnered considerable support from the late punk audience and spawned more albums and tours. His celebrity stature as a poet and punk songwriter/musician was unique. Few people in this country are identified both inside and outside the academic community as first and foremost being a poet. Like his mentors, Frank O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg, his work incorporates details of urban modernism that spark with a brilliancy of rare insight. He ended his Basketball Diaries with the line, "I just want to be pure."

The photo I've found was taken by David Shankbone in 2007. On first view Jim Carroll looks ravaged by the excesses of sex, drugs and rock, a warning somehow. But spending more time with the photo I changed my viewpoint and have grown to like it a lot. We can look into his eyes and see what? An opacity perhaps, a sense organ, a tool for looking unfiltered at the world (begging the question whether drugs filter or unfilter) and collecting those findings into a base from where his intelligence and language skills can create. The photo seems to turn celebrity status upside down: the handsome Irish good looks of his youth have been distilled by his decades of writing and performing into the approximation of a wizened god's close-up, one who's seen terrible deeds and grand attractions. Though a tall man, his elfin ears and skinny frame belie his 60 years, and exhibit some weird palimpsest of youth peeking through the decimation of bad teeth and muscle disintegration. No-one gets out alive, least of all a poet who's stock in trade is experience. I will assume he still dyed his hair the red of his clan, since gray would be the natural color of his age--a show of affectation, a yearning for atypical acceptance, and a human surrender to fame. That the shot was taken in front of a marble Doric column is also coincidentally of interest, dragging the early associations of classical poetry and myth into a more modern questioning or appraisal. I think it's a very good portrait of Jim Carroll both real and imagined. The poem above, in which he speaks to Kurt Cobain after his death is filled with understanding. Both knew heroin addiction; limelight; the desire to create and its attendant euphoria; an acute sensitivity to pain; and the weighty temptation to escape for good. It seems a poem of brotherhood somehow, and yet discovers a difference: one's desire to never relinquish the thrill of writing a good line, a lyric, or the hope of similar accomplishments. Jim Carroll continued on, Kurt Cobain ended--those decisions are personal, demanded of us all. The photo above lets us discern some of the cost of that continuing.

(Photo above is of Jim Carroll taken in 2007 by David Shankbone).