Butterflies ( for Neeli Cherkovski)

Transatlantic butterfly
Translucent cocoon, on metal railing

Protected species, your frail design
More precious than ancient Chinese inks

Butterflies in the story of creation
Grace landing on the head of the serpent

Kept in captivity under glass
Adoring eyes do not remove the pins

- Chris Mansel

Bob Dylan

Dylan says modern recordings "atrocious"Tue Aug 22, 2006 1:30 PM ET


LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Bob Dylan says the quality of modern recordings is "atrocious," and even the songs on his new album sounded much better in the studio than on disc.

"I don't know anybody who's made a record that sounds decent in the past 20 years, really," the 65-year-old rocker said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine.

Dylan, who released eight studio albums in the past two decades, returns with his first recording in five years, "Modern Times," next Tuesday.

Noting the music industry's complaints that illegal downloading means people are getting their music for free, he said, "Well, why not? It ain't worth nothing anyway."

"You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them," he added. "There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like ... static."

Dylan said he does his best to fight technology, but it's a losing battle.

"Even these songs probably sounded ten times better in the studio when we recorded 'em. CDs are small. There's no stature to it."

Down By The Riverside

Wash me down with alcohol
Leave a little in the bottle
I’ll be sending for it in the spring
Pull me back from the throttle
I’ll be going down the riverbed in flames

A house of detention with sunlit floors
Pushing a mop over the seat where I sit
Send the bottle this winter won’ t you dear
They won’t let you open your veins here
Cause I’ll crawl inside when I done with it

All nightmares have come true
I’m alone in a room with you
Take a picture and throw it in the fire
I’ve endured your final lasting ire
I’ll be going down the riverbed in flames

Chorus:

I have constrained and walled myself in
I’m the opening to hell that invites in
Those who go down by the riverside
Down by the riverside



- Chris Mansel

Apocalypose Now

Saigon... shit; I'm still only in Saigon... Every time I think I'm gonna wake up back in the jungle. When I was home after my first tour, it was worse. I'd wake up and there'd be nothing. I hardly said a word to my wife, until I said "yes" to a divorce. When I was here, I wanted to be there; when I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle. I'm here a week now... waiting for a mission... getting softer; every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker, and every minute Charlie squats in the bush, he gets stronger. Each time I looked around, the walls moved in a little tighter.


- Francis Ford Coppola

God's Times of Death

The graves of eastern religion are horned
There are no birds in the Holy Land…
Television prints the pages of the Koran
The divine now illuminated.
Martin Heidegger writing,
“Every spoken word is already an answer.’

Confusing language with prayer, with war
A Jewish Star becomes a Muslim emblem for
Sobriety, hell must be approached like the first
Insects to the corpse, the anguished state.


- Chris Mansel

Well for Water

When the darkness finds you it looks a lot like the light. Many artists and writers are ill informed as to its illumination. Change becomes hunger and anxiety when faced with every new day, each new work, the feelings of adrenaline and despair mirroring the same level of intensity.
There is no logic or specific lecture you can draw on to endure what is happening to you when you discover a talent or desire to create. The synapse clicks and its rotors counter every movement until even acts of sexuality or daily requirements of living become contrary to the process of living.
Shakespeare wrote, “Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?” Medication is what makes an artist an individual.


- Chris Mansel

The Hickory of Oak and Down Crucified Man

Part one

Brokered from a well of broken spirits, noosed, a rope of blood from the neck before. Wearing church slacks, coat and tie throat slit from the bushes jumped onto the wagon seat. Throat slashed from ear to mole, shrieks of horror and bodies lying in state. Contribute to the drying well before you start home. Won’t be coming back to services tonight. Scalp feathers on the axe hanging on the wall, and a slow fire burning and water on the road. The next day a holiday and horses in the pasture, the smell of gun powder riffing up through the over night pass in the hills.
Later chain gang baking in the hot sun, perspiration beading up like a widow’s cheeks on Christmas morning. Gray faces in a Mississippi graveyard hoeing Alabama dust. The sermon won’t have a wishbone or a plate of beans. Glory is in the stones you pull up along the way. Young boy walks his fingers across the 88’s, the rugged cross-burned down into the coals of hell. Nails holding together the axe head to pine and a copperhead on Waterloo shores where Indians once boarded a ship. Brown skin weighting in the water that turns over itself.
A young lady from Texarkana rubs her dress against the fence. The warden’s niece on her way to church watches the water cup passed from bucket to chin. Years before the depression stretched to the shores of Africa and the coastal lands of Germany. Before the war struck an industry of disposable labor. Before the chain gang became the factory window. The young lady eased her skirt from her bare foot to the snap of the hosiery safety pin device, a sight surely to make Uncle Remus pour out his whiskey to shuck oysters from the side of the road.


- Chris Mansel

Half A Decade

I’m a moment of quiet clarity
Of indecent integrity
A conceitful exposing light
A frail and open permissive night

I’m a window open to the floor
A bed at night with a whore
A lamp that burns butter for monks to pray
I’m a writer you’ve never read who doesn’t go away

An artist who would carry a tree to a stone
A reverent and lustful tome
An escaping rat from a docked ship
I’m all of these on this list


- Chris Mansel

Brooklyn Visitation

I’m thinking of you Allen
In what was once the area of the caregiver?
The restless inhibition of a lonesome traveler
Doomed to celebrity and not to sex
This asylum riddled Oedipus wrecked
The diagnosis of cancer
The transgressions of idyllic marriage?
Allen marrying on a May Day street
While Chicano worshippers roast in effigy
The office of the president

Noise would run to your window
Hospital beds turned to puzzle floors of black and white
Coffins carried of migrant workers
Shot while tossing lettuce into baskets and not into salads
The corporate dining room looking over
The hospital parking lot
The grounds dingy with rebellion and water bottles

Allen your gentle heart swarming the sutras for sound
Calming the protestors with a gentle sigh
The Internet now reaping the revenue of your reporting from Chicago
Set it now Murrow would have said

Allen your penis in the sawdust of a master’s degree dissertation
Allen your poetry read at the trail of a lover in Italian magistrates diction
Allen the de-colonized Jew Buddhist Lama resting above the blackboard
At Brooklyn College
Allen your songs of Blake in the hymn books in eastern seaboard schools

Allen what is the phrase of your humanity, where is your soul
I’ve seen you on my bookshelf and wondered
Allen is there no natural condition



- Chris Mansel

Louisiana

They found the Ark of the Covenant when the waters began to recede
You’ve never seen New Orleans look the world more in the teeth
Not since the Daily Crescent in 1848 set its type into print
The world was always looking for the ink in the fold to indent

Butter lamps and the luxuriant of America pulled to the rivers edge
Slaves from Haiti and Africa moving towards Rampart Street’s ledge
Buffalo meat hanging from the street lamps and sold through the door
Followed by a caravan of murderers, politicians, thieves and whores

Sunsets when the masters hide in the field and the slaves embark
When the hail falls like a lariat and the smells carry it into the dark
The berth of Ship Island covered in the ashes of Marie Leveau
Even today all the cypress know to turn from black to blue


Throw the boat astern even hell burns
Cast off the lines and lean into the turn
Louisiana, Louisiana even heaven can turn


- Chris Mansel

LIstening Post

A void of apprehension
Orchestras of technique and noise
Reversed upon the learning of speech
Irritating the ventilation of sound escaping

The wing-span of birds considered and measured
the lapping of a brook controlled by movement of stones
to refit the narrative of nature, to reuse the listener
the rights of our brethren in the asylums
who were taught magic and dismissed at their peak
to destroy the tune bound by the white whale

the invocation of a seizure
the choreography of a starless night
the sound of sunken ships jostling about in the dark Atlantic

that is the sound, that is the music, that is the poetry I hear…


in my soul.



- Chris Mansel

The Relief Boat (Oren's Aboard)

Ten days in the kingdom of evenings falling
A new shepherd lies down by the creek bed
His decisions are like widows speaking in a dream
And all he sees is what rolls around in his head
All he sees is what rolls around in his head

Tree touch the garden floor and the rain never falls
Insects in a sea circus are corpulent in their dismay
Dreams are like shadows of kitchens on narrow walls
The weather ashore is garnered even as it loses its way

Buggered and dirked by a Thessalonians darker side
A fellow traveler with worse rolling around in his head
The custom being to kill his children and sleep with his wives
He travels until he reaches the creek bed and goes inside


- Chris Mansel

Presence (After reading a poem by Hank Lazer)

12:00 am. the day after Easter, Jesus’ birthday
my brother in law sleeping behind me
recovering from surgery, already suffering from Multiple Sclerosis
cancer and other deformities, his spirits high

the hiding of Easter eggs he watched from
the sliding door in the living room
recalls the wreck we saw yesterday on the way home from Birmingham
out of his head in pain, going in and out of sleep he saw the body
on the stretcher with the sheet pulled over it
hearing on the news 4 U.S. soldiers dead in Iraq

delivered the day before we left to go to Birmingham
IMPORVISATIONS by Vernon Frazer 697 pages
Kind words from Frazer in the package
My words seem to matter but only to the point
When they cease

- Chris Mansel

Vice and Vengeance

The dead burn as well as the living; a man who is afraid of fire would say this. But as he rolls in his squalor the world follows in the steps placed before them. The working class, the laborers, those below the poverty line revel in the hard work of the passing day, they take pride in their ruin, they pass as they are born. If you think you can defeat them your life is as meaningless as the squalor in where you reside.

- Chris Mansel

9th Street InGloria

3:46 in the morning and the tide has shifted

(gravel burnt by cigarette lighter
collected and hot glued to masonite)

the image is of a hotel window being removed by
force

black paint is applied and human hair from hair cuts
is attached to the corners of the piece

words are inscribed detailing the contents of the room

3:48 in the morning


- Chris Mansel

Who This Time

Limb resting on the back left tire
and a rain falling stirring up the dust
someone said a killer is worth his hire
here I am with a knife ready to cut
Mississippi Alabama Tennessee line
Sunday morning and the night’s not done
Bodies sewn together with old fence line
Sunday morning and the night’s not done

Head on the savannah road sign
Happens when a killer gets in his wine
Who was it this time
Who was it this time

Trees in the garden touching the ground
Window looks out on a box of shells
Down on the lake you hear the sound
Of a man shooting into his own hell
Horses come and stomp out the fire
You can hear the bodies hit the ground
How much blood to call you back home
You can hear the bodies hit the ground

Head on the savannah road sign
Happens when a killer gets in his wine
Who was it this time
Who was it this time

- Chris Mansel

You Don't Want Her After You

This is what she said to you
Bust that woman up in her head
Pull out all that shit she said
You don’t want me after you
You don’t want me after you

She come up the road one night
Swinging a hammer in her hand
Said I’m looking for my man
You don’t want me after you
You don’t want me after you

Hell come over the banks today
Everything she owned floating away
She reach her hand up to the lord and say
You don’t want me after you
You don’t want me after you

Chorus:

Fist like iron cold like steel
Hate like a gasket bust its seal
You don’t want her after you
You don’t want her after you


- Chris Mansel

Keep The Devil Back In His Room

There’s twelve snakes in the hollow
Guess what they’d say
There’s twelve snakes in the hollow
Guess what they’d say
Twelve snakes in the hollow
Getting fat on sin
Twelve snakes in the hollow
Can’t fit no more in

Devil hired a woman
To give me kids
Devil hired a woman
What do you think they did
Devil hired a woman
To give me kids
Devil hired a woman
You know the lord forbid

Judas kept on walking
Till he got into the fire
Judas kept on walking
You’d think he’d retire
Judas kept on walking
Kept this kids in the room
Judas kept on walking
Spread’em with a butcher’s broom

Chorus:
Got to slip the ash back in the tomb
Keep the devil back in his room
Got to keep the devil back in his room


- Chris Mansel

You're A Shooting Star (for Hank WIlliams Sr.)

I was drinking on the grave of someone I never knew
When the feeling overcame me and I thought of you
No more lonesome in your life you reached out to me
And I wonder if heaven is as cold as where you lie

The flowers don’t grow in this corner of the field
The grass is too poor I think for the rain to hit
I wonder if this bottle will disturb your last grace
And I wonder if hell is as warm as the sun up in the sky

Tears brought me to this abandoned cemetery today
As I drove along I thought of what I would say
You were the only daughter of a man to drunk to stand
And I wonder if the prison I put you in bears my name

Chorus:

Tears fall as thick as tar
I wonder my darling just where you are
I miss you so much you’re never that far
Don’t you know that you’re a shooting star

- Chris Mansel

preserved

The driveway of J.D. Salinger's house.


That the great men seek silence, that the myth is more than the truth, we should all allow for grace to inhabit our curiousity.


- Chris Mansel

The Cypress Are Touching The Ground

Lost in the century the dream awoke on a train
There were ribbons flying and there was rain
From the everglades to the pacific stormy winds
The airports were shut down by well-armed men

The Mt. Rushmore cliffs went gray under the light
Middle America stood on the front lawns that night
The waters in New Orleans rose from corkscrew heights
The countries work force is moving like ghosts in plain sight

I’ve seen an Alaskan sunset from Canada’s skies
I’ve been asked what have I done with my life
I’ve tried to do good but some wrong has led my hand
Couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t take a stand

Chorus:

The cypress are touching the ground
If they fall it won’t make a sound
The cypress are touching the ground


- Chris Mansel

Up The Levee Way (for Jake Berry

Where daddy going mama
Where he been
Going on a killing
He’s going again
Took his shotgun mama
Took his hand ax blade
Going up the levee
To the parson’s shade

Got to see about a woman
Cut her children up
Threw them in the well
Then covered it up
All kind of evil mama
Down the levee way
Daddy been working
All down that way

Here comes daddy mama
His clothes all wet
He been to the river
Up to his chest
Daddy’s cursing at the river
Swinging his hand axe blade round
Daddy said he don’t want us round
Better get to the levee while the water’s down

Chorus:

Here comes evil up the levee way
Trouble comes floating up this way
Mama why daddy acting this way

- Chris Mansel

quote

“I seem to have the blind self-acceptance of the eccentric who can't conceive that his eccentricities are not clearly understood.”


- Saul Bellow

Unknown Destination

Grady took an overdose of pills in the bath
They laid him out at midnight softly on his back
They could swear they heard a whisper from his mouth
Saying get away gentlemen you don’t know what its about

There’s crows in the tree line and flowers in the grove
Landmines exposed where the grass has just been mowed
The likeliness of Grady stamps his feet and slaps his thighs
His suicide note was broadcast and won a Pulitzer Prize

Grady is carried to the Church of England for the inquest
His clothes are cut off and there are wires across his chest
Troops muster along the skyline embedded with victims past
Meanwhile the organs are removed and the mold is cast


- Chris Mansel

All About The Night

“Once upon a time there was a little boy who went outside, and that boy was me — I went outside in music.”
- Harry Partch

On the floor there’s hunting
The insects scurry at the dog’s decay
On the ceiling they’re running
And it’s never far away

How outspoken are firecrackers
When the worms crawl across the match
You can see the centipede count his fingers
Just like the anthill when the babies hatch

I’m a gypsy at the cave’s entrance to hell
Like the doorman over the sewer grate
It’s nice work if you can stand the smell
One day all of the insects will come to mate

Chorus:

A deer in the headlights,
a dove down a well
It’s all about the night,
like the henchmen in the dell


- Chris Mansel

Hunter S. Thompson

(Joe) Finnegan’s Wake

The ghost of John Cassavetes has been embedded with the insurgents his camera circling the small bowl of heroin displayed for the Time magazine photographer. Cassavetes sits motionless behind the lens as the photographer changes his flash. The photographer is silenced before he can speak. His silence is felt through the Pakistani cave.
Posthumous reels captured by civilian contractors are sold to a small news agency and surface at the Sundance film festival. Celebrities their gift bags in tow flock the small fifty seat theater and begin to speak on their cell phones. Air is pumped into the theater as the celebrities breathe in the black ash trucked in special from the graves of Rwanda. Articles show up in Maxim magazine and feature photographs of celebrities vomiting onto the snow caked wood balcony of a local hotel. The ghost of Cassavetes stares blankly at the small rain clouds gathering over the horizon.


- Chris Mansel

Don’t Cha) Bury A Working Man (For the workers and Woody Guthrie)

Stretching my soul over a conveyor of steel
For every strip of human flesh it rolls
Soot caking on my face and the wheel
Deep into a poverty mansions hole

I heard my footsteps along the gravel
I stopped as the dust from my clothes
Hit the door before me as I unraveled
I sunk into the floor until I didn’t know

Houses line the fences like headstones
The yards are the only thing alive
A palace like this could never be a home
Where the kids have stopped crying

How hot does hell get before you feel the chill
How slow can you melt the steel before its filled
I look at the scars I got at work just today
Where in the hell did hell come from anyway

Chorus:

It’s an insult to bury a working man in his skin
What does the ground know about where it’s been


- Chris Mansel

Lucinda Williams