Poems vaguely related to the day's postings: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

Streetside Elegy

Maybe we would trip along the brick-paved walks in Georgetown, if you were here now, or bluster gleefully into the wood-panelled coffeehouse. Heads would rustle and arch, leaf-murmuring, wind-bent by our entrance. Laughter, swept out on the broomy breeze, would blow back again.

We'd be preciously occidental--order tea and sit outside in the urban dust and chaff. We'd watch ashes eddy across the patio as we sugared and sipped our fleeting tea. You'd forget to stir and find yours bitter; sigh, and set it aside, and peer at me bleakly.

This time, I would speak up. I would say: "Sweet, keep drinking--at the bottom, it gets sweeter."

Blue Peaches

In the kindergarten classroom, apples didn't have to be red. All my flowers had no petals, and all my peaches were blue.

I wonder sometimes if you were there, orange nettles and purple vines scribbled outside the lines across your page and onto mine.

I don't remember anyone I knew then, and they all seemed such necessary friends. I wonder if so long ago I knew you, and something could have been said.

I wonder a lot about all our tender free expressions and how they got us where we are.

I wonder if coloring inside the lines would have made me Republican, or forgetting show-and-tells made me poetic, fictive, teller of tales. What about blue peaches and all my cool depressions?

Even then, did you lean out from rails of landings and playscapes, bravely, senselessly acrobatic? Were you frequently lost, not wanting to be led? I wonder still if something might have been said.

I can't help demanding reasons from the past-- orange nettles, purple vines--but at last there's nothing in a thousand lines of poem that I could say to you.

All those peaches didn't have to be blue, orange nettles, purple vines-- you might have stayed inside the lines. Whatever childhood air they found you leaning in, it didn't have to be this way.

But this, this insufficiency, this poem, is water for a cactus in the desert, for a world that has already learned to do without you.

Me, my spells and charms, my rafts and camels of words, all my efforts to take your memory by the arm, these will not do.

Orange nettles, purple vines, all my wishes and drawn out lines can't speak to what you were then.

All my blue peaches are yours now, but as always you wander outside the lines I am trying so much to find you in.

Nothing can be said. I cannot talk to you anymore.

I only hold your memory, the hard, blue, shriveled pit I cannot swallow.

Boy. Insomnia.

A boy dumps all his pocket change in the river. He makes wishes on the fountain that moves, and his wishes cannot be stopped. They flow from him, not as the rushing silt goes, but slowly his heavy wishes move as the river bed moves, almost invisibly, taking an ever-wider path to the same eventual place.

The boy is a creeping delta of desire.

Even at rest, the energy of love is in him, as the molten fire is sleeping in the cold mud, as the secret orbit is in the atom, as the hidden collisions of water are in the glassy pond.

He goes out walking under the stars.
He likes the light of them, its slow arrival,
likes the urgent brightness that propels them across such distance, through centuries of waiting, to him. He laughs to think of such an urgent message finally coming so quiet and dim.

The boy is a continuous light, arriving slowly in his urgent life.

Late wildflower bloom in November, stage-frightened actor cured by the curtain call, grown man squeezed into the kindergarten desk.

Even awake, in the throes of his shyness, the boy is filled with a wealth of somnolent passions.
His cheeks swell with slumbering kisses— This is a particular trait of his, this unique, wide, toothless smile.
He looks like a chipmunk who has found something too precious to be revealed.

All the love he owns lies sleeping inside him, But he is wide awake. He tosses and turns.

Everywhere he turns, he imagines he sees a face.

He is as patient as trees, slow as a riverbed, Insistent as starlight.

Everywhere he turns, he imagines he sees a face.

One night a face will shine beside him like a moon, And he will finally sleep.

Continued from Part 1 amd Part 2.

Sitting on the plane for my connecting flight in Dallas, bound for Newark, NJ, I hear the pilot announce that we are briefly delayed. Little do I realize what this bodes for my return trip. We end up departing for Newark 45 minutes late, and arrive about 30 minutes late. On the plane I am finishing up the novelization of The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai, and I'm thinking of how much it reminds me of Kyle Fischer.

Buckaroo Banzai is the kind of man we don't have anymore in the modern age, a true Renaissance man, a brilliant mind who also plays a mean guitar. He also saves the world on a regular basis, about the only aspect in which Kyle might fall short of his fictional counterpart.

He may not save the world on a regular basis, but he and the band can assuredly rock.

On arrival in Newark, I still have plenty of time to pick up my luggage and rental car, check into the Princeton Hyatt, call the New Jersey Transit hotline, and drive to Princeton Junction to catch the 7:40 to Penn Station.

I have a pre-purchased ticket to Rainer Maria's show at Brownie's NYC, a tiny East Village bar that is closing at the end of the month. In preparation of the upcoming trip to Princeton, I had surfed over to the band website, hoping to find Kyle's e-mail address again and attempt to arrange some time to meet up and hang out. Instead, I found out they were playing a 3-week residency at Brownie's for the club's swan song, so I booked the advance ticket and decided to surprise Kyle at the show.

On the train, I start thinking about all the tiny ways people influenced me back then, and I am quietly sending my thank yous to the universe for all the Katie Daniels and Kyle Fischers and Leslies of my youth, the people who made it all bearable for a hypersensitive kid without even realizing it. The people I secretly admired and sometimes emulated.

Somehow I navigate through Penn Station and find the subway station. After repeated second-guessing of whether I am on the local or express platform, I simply give up and take the next A train that comes along. A switch to the L train and a short ride later, I am making my way into the tiny, tiny club.

It is packed from wall to wall with people. The opening band is on, and I completely forget their name. They are decent, though.

I squeeze my way to the bar and buy a beer. When the changeover starts for Rye Coalition, second on the bill, I throw auditory caution to the wind and push my way to the second row up front.

Rye Coalition are loud. Loud and funky and dripping in sweat. They give an incredible show at an energy level I am completely incapable of returning after travelling all day. I do my best to at least bop along to the beat and smile.

The band makes a joking comment about how all the Rainer Maria fans were probably not expecting them. Nods and murmurs of assent from almost everyone, but we are all enjoying it anyway, except when the hardcore RC fans down front get overzealously physical in their joyous self-expression.

Finally, Rainer Maria takes the stage.

Kyle is on guitar and vocals, Caithlin on vocals and bass, William on the drums.

The audience is restless during the sound check, and then silence falls. Kyle and Caithlin look briefly at each other. Smiles spread on their faces, and a silent momentum swells.

From the first note, it is obvious these three souls are meant to be together musically. Kyle and Caithlin have been boyfriend/girlfriend, and probably still are, but it doesn't really matter. They were understandably coy about it in the one interview with them I've read, and I can see why. It's clear that the destiny of all three of these people is tied up in an enduring friendship which renders such concerns meaningless.

I've never seen them on their home turf, where instead of the weariness of a long tour they have only a brief journey from Brooklyn to burden them. They've rocked the house in Austin, but this East Village show takes off like a rocket.

Kyle is explosive from the very first song, Caithlin bouncing and kicking and smiling along, half-dancing to the music as William intensely pounds out the beats from the back row, drenching himself in sweat only two songs in. The joy of living and making music shines from them. In the tiny, dark club, they are lit up like stars.

In the second row, I close my eyes and just drift on the sound for a while.

They are such a gift to the fans in live performance, a physical manifestation of the attributes of their music: acrobatic and energetic as Kyle throws himself through the air and across the stage, expansive and expressive as Caithlin sings with mouth open wide and eyes sparkling in the stage lights, rhythmic and strong and unpredictable as William beats the drums and throws his head back. You don't just hear the music, you see and feel it.

The audience is in ecstasy—the slightly more animated than arm-folding and head-nodding sort of indie-fan ecstasy, anyway—the band in a state of utter musical beatitude.

The band tears through a set of hard-edged songs from their entire repertoire, early releases to unreleased new material. The new material has a gritty, earnest, barely-contained verve to it that I really love. Heads nod appreciatively to the new tunes, and cheers erupt loudly at their completion.

Mid-show, Kyle spots me in the second row. (That's me with the camera.)

"Jon Van Matre," he interjects suddenly, in the middle of announcing the next song. "I went to high school with him. All the way from Temple, Texas. Somebody buy him a beer—hey, do you drink?"

"Yes, of course."

"—Good. Buy him two or three beers."

And then the band is off again. I am just a blip in the momentum of their perfect night.

No one buys me a beer, of course, but that's not the point. There is plenty of intoxication to go around in the music.

The show ends, and we insist on an encore. There are a lot of shows where most of the audience is just going along with the encore applause out of a sense of duty, but I am sure this isn't one of them. Rainer Maria have earned it, as much as one can "earn" the right to give even more after already giving all you've got.

They still have something left, though, and they send us off in style before retiring to the merch table at the back of the room.

I knock around the club for a little while as the crowd thins out. Eventually I make my way to the back of the club. I chat with Kyle for a while, as much as one can when there are other fans pressing in and merchandise to be sold. He gives me his number and we tentatively plan a possible meeting later in the week.

I talk to Caithlin for a little while after that. I tell her I'm staying in Princeton, and she relates an anecdote about playing at one of their "supper clubs". Apparently, these are their equivalent of fraternities. According to Caithlin, it was a very strange gig.

"Imagine," she says, "those movies where when the party gets really wild, one of the guys takes his tie off and ties it around his head.

"They don't even get that wild."

I haven't seen much of Princeton yet, but this sounds like a fair characterization to me.

It's late, and I have to go if I am going to catch the last train to Princeton, so I say my goodbyes and take the subway back to Penn Station.

As the week goes on, I never do find a chance to meet up with Kyle under less pressured circumstances, which is a real disappointment. But maybe next visit.

I do want the chance to tell him about all of this, the tiny and not-so-tiny ways we all are constantly touching each other without realizing it. I want to thank him for indirectly getting me into Bauhaus, for being who he was when we were in school together (even if it was more properly what you might call "untogether"), for being part of the circle of friends that made my brother the exceedingly cool person he is today, and for making music like this that never ceases to knock me over and say "wake up!" every time I hear it. For giving me all those gifts.

On the train ride home, my ears still ringing from the show, I am completely happy where I am. At home, I'm full of doubt and concern about my working situation, my social life, and all the tiny annoyances of a modern life. But here on the train, hearing its soothing clack as we coast through sleeping towns, I'm a happier, better version of me, for at least a little while.

Note: photos in this article are by Jasper Coolidge, and borrowed from here without permission, because I am a lazy arse and have yet to scan my own photos. Next time I'll have the digital camera, and you'll get instant gratification. Jasper has a great eye, so please visit these sites and tell them how much the photos rock!

Continued from Part 1.

The students of three different middle schools converged in Temple's one high school. All of us who had shared the same classes for three years were scattered to the four corners of the sprawling campus.

My freshman year was my year of experimental social interaction, with as many setbacks as steps forward, but I finished the year with a decent set of acquaintances and a renewed sense of both the cruelty and congeniality of other human beings.

What I was still completely oblivious to was reality. The reality of our town, of Temple, TX.

Until my sophomore year, I was living in a city of dreams.

I never had another class with Leslie, but Kyle was in one or two of my classes each year, as were many of her other friends.

I was a bit more cautious that year, though. Mostly I kept to my small circle of acquaintances from Biology class. My senior friends with cars (a major asset during our open-campus lunch periods) had all graduated, so out of necessity more than anything I banded together with a few people from Biology because it was the class immediately preceding lunch. I kept my distance from everyone else, still mindful of some of the harsher setbacks of the previous year.

Our daily routine consisted of lunch, immediately followed by an escape from the crowded lunchroom to the library, where we would read, or occasionally program fractals on the library computer. I also wrote poetry a lot, having begun my first period of prolific output in freshman year.

That sophomore year, Leslie was working as a librarian's assistant during the same period I had lunch. She always half-smiled and said hello and made a small effort at conversation when I came to the librarian's desk to check out or return a book.

If there's anything I regret, it's that I never gave more than a cursory response. I don't pretend to believe it would have changed anything other than the quality of the time we had. But that in itself would have been something.

She terrified me, though. For a completely different reason now. She had seen right into me that one night in 8th grade, but now she was a stranger because I had no idea who she was becoming. Everyone was changing in high school, all of us, and I had watched from a distance as her wardrobe grew darker and her hair became lighter and she didn't seem to laugh so much anymore.

I suppose I was afraid of being known by someone I really didn't know, of trusting the one person I probably trusted most implicitly of all my sophomore classmates. And I was afraid of not knowing just why I trusted her so implicitly.

I should have looked at her with the same look she once gave me, the one that said, "I do understand," but I never did more than mumble a few words and take my book.

A lot of things happened, and I have no idea in what order they happened anymore. All I know is that the dream version of Temple, the Temple of quiet suburbia and people who are good, kind, honest, upright, church-going and law-abiding fell apart that year.

A friend lost three fingers in a shop class accident. An automotive accident claimed three sophomores and a freshman on their way to or from a party. Temple started to show its dark underbelly, the side of it that eats people, that chews them up and spits out little pieces.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, she took her own life.

I never went to the funeral. I told myself she'd had real friends, people who knew her, like Kyle, and the funeral was for them. I think really it was because I didn't want to look at her if she couldn't see my eyes saying "I do understand."

I submitted a poem to the school literary journal that year. It was awfully mediocre, but it was about the way I wished the world was. Not the city of dreams, just the small ways people support each other and that being enough.

Kyle had one published, too, and a passing reference in it to "Bela Lugosi's Dead" would be the reason I would eventually buy a Bauhaus album without ever having heard them before. So many tiny ways we all affect one another.

I thought his poem might have been about Leslie, but I never felt the need to be sure. On the same page, though, they published one of hers, posthumously. It reminded me very much of the person she was in 6th grade, across the big rectangular table from me, giddy and laughing.

I got out of Temple as soon as possible. After sophomore year, I escaped to an early-entrance college program. I took with me the hard lesson of that year, though. People were going to get hurt, no matter what, so I might as well open up to them and make the most of what we had.

At a summer program that year I made one of my most constant friends and repeated housmates, Shanna. When I started at the Texas Academy of Math and Science that fall, I made more of the truest friends I've ever had, like Alice, with whom I had a very tempestuous but rewarding friendship.

I was finally what I considered a better version of myself. I was certainly nowhere near finished learning all the social skills I had neglected, but I was a better, happier version of me, even when it hurt like hell.

Kyle finished high school in Temple. He became friends with my younger brother to a degree I was never really friends with him myself. He and my brother and Josh Bandy and a whole bunch of other kids were in th epicenter of a nascent punk/indie scene in Temple.

When I came back to Temple four years later, I had spent two years getting into punk and indie (and yes, Bauhaus) while at university in Washington, DC. I was surprised and delighted to see a thriving scene in Temple.

Kyle had just left, moving on to Wisconsin, but behind him was an active music scene. Living in Temple, and with nothing better to do, I went to a lot of their impromptu concerts.

I saw Temple with new eyes this time around, saw the city behind the curtain of dreams. I saw the drug-dealing kids, the long-sleeve kids in summer who cut themselves in the bathroom when they thought no one was looking, the bored kids going around the building looking for a place to have a half-hearted screw.

Meanwhile in Wisconsin, Kyle was forming a band called Rainer Maria. They made an EP.

Again, I got out of Temple as quickly as possible.

I moved to Austin, and a few years went by.

I lived happily, mostly, and found a good group of friends. I'm still changing to this day, but the version of me that lives here in Austin is really the best version of myself I've had so far.

It's not so much because of where I am as it is because of where I came from.

Kyle's band made some albums. I saw them play live in Austin a couple of times, and once I gave him a sheaf of poetry I had written, many of them poems about those years in junior high and high school. Being on the road at the time, he probably lost them, but mostly I just needed the feeling of passing them on to someone who knew, anyway.

Eventually, he made a solo album, and on it was a song called "Temple, TX". I heard it, and it was if I could see him looking at me with those eyes that say "I do understand."

Temple, TX

We need something to eat — it should come as no surprise. We'll pickle the feet, the tongue and the eyes.

Temple, why have you sold your children for food?

Temple, your mother's your sister. You kill your young — you're young — yr young — firstborn sons: Redhead boys selling nosebleeds and sleepless nights. And your daughters hang themselves with sheets and die of AIDS.

There's a barbeque — you're invited — we'll eat them whole.

Every word of this song is true. I don't know all of the characters in the song, but I know in my heart every one of them is true. Every one of them is someone Kyle knew. I've been bowled over by Rainer Maria albums before, but this song finally opened my eyes to what a consummate artist Kyle Fischer has become. He paints the bleakness and lurking horror of our mutual hometown with the pigment of truth.

And it makes me wonder, what was he like back then when I was merely trusting him from afar? What sort of person was he? Is this a better version of him, or was he always this brilliant?

All I know for certain is that I am glad he escaped, that he wasn't chewed up and eaten by Temple, or worse, simply trapped there in the dream.

He lives in Brooklyn now, and the band is going strong on the heels of their last album A Better Version Of Me, and I am going to see them on the first day of my trip to Princeton.