Bruised Music (II)

Music has the unique

Value to be objectless

And sparkling as bling

Splay it that this is
The sound of value
Talking who hears it

Like music in an age
Of control who controls it
Like sampling was not a map

Divested of some soundless
Territory I am playing it
Or rather how it plays me

Until I am an ether called
Control to the sampling

Rate of Reagan I wrote this

Anthem now it is codified so
Even country looks liberal 

All fucked-up and deriving sense

From this no other set of sounds
Modeling no one’s death

Least of all some Caesar

Testifying to this seizure
Called control deprived of every-
thing except wild consent

I realized this voice was wrong
What the music did

Intuitive like all sovereigns

All the wrong notes turn right

The police they make music too

Inside sampled ears.

2012 Poets House Showcase (Reading)

2012 Poets House Showcase Opening Reading

DATE AND TIME: June 30, 2012 - 1:00PM
EVENT LOCATION: Kray Hall
ADMISSION: Free and open to the public

A score of leading poets, representing the breadth and diversity of contemporary poetry, kick off the 20th Annual Poets House Showcase, which gathers more than 2,000 poetry titles. Readings by Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Eduardo C. Corral, Thom Donovan, Aracelis Girmay, Scott Hightower, Cathy Park Hong, Eileen Myles, Murat Nemet-Nejat, Idra Novey, Michael O’Brien, Rowan Ricardo Philips, Martha Rhodes, Frances Richard, Leonard Schwartz, Leigh Stein, Mónica de la Torre, M. A. Vizsolyi and John Yau.

Others Letters: Chris Martin and Jared Stanley

"But now, blowing all that back into the recesses is the picture of Bushwick Bill. Oaughhhw. That picture is just so magnetic. The looks on the faces of Scarface and Willie D. That fucking CELL PHONE. The damaged soldier whose only recourse is publicity. Here's the wikipedia description:

The album cover is a graphic picture of member Bushwick Bill in the hospital. Bill had shot himself in the eye after his girlfriend refused to shoot him during an altercation. [3] The other two Geto Boys members and the group's management team yanked Bill out of the hospital room in order to take the picture, removing Bill's eyepatch and IV in the process. Bill has expressed regret over the album cover, saying "Its still hurts me to look at that cover because that was a personal thing I went through... I still feel the pain from the fact I've got a bullet in my brain... I think it was pretty wrong to do it, even though I went along with the program at first."[1]

I still feel pain from the fact
I've got a bullet in my brain.

And what about Pac, then? He's still got a bullet "I" on hologram? There's this essay Charles Bernstein wrote years ago, relating Creeley's one functional eye to his notion of selfhood, of I-ness. Bushwick shoots his eye out and Pac turns his I into a bullet. Not to mention that the I in THUGLIFE stands for infant. This man whose revolutionary mother decayed into a crack addict while he was a boy. Wounded soldiers with no recourse but publicity."
--Chris Martin and Jared Stanley, from "Soldier's Recourse"