Rev. Darrell Jones aka Medicine Man Short Fire (2013)
The charge of silence
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No poem works in my mind for more than a moment and that’s both the (remaining) attraction and the (growing) distraction. I mean more like more as in moar but also more like NO MORE, like more no moar, even though “no more” doesn’t get you a fraction of a strobe flash of a shadow of a shit around here
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Imagination as impoverished possibility
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Your/you’re. Having is whole where Being is broken. (And just when we become / Our own perfect problems)
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Living in Shanghai I find myself more
often walking the streets talking to myself
The phones (head, smart) make it easy
and I’m always there, just like any other
local ghost gone merely global, i.e. insane
(tell it to a shepherd, tell it to a farmer
tell it to shaman, hunter, gatherer)
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We are around nine months less than zero to one-hundred-and-twenty or so years old. Somewhere, a few neurons and their somebodies can still actually make it back to, say, 1894, making then & there matter like shadow-verbs for being-here-now yet where & when we might only imagine but don’t, because here we are
Cast forward 120 to 2134, say to a stadium-floodlit marching band woven among rhizome-fissured cross-shadow plumes, drums & tubas & fifes on painted turf in splintered tessellated stop-motion poses beneath billowing star-white gnats & moths (Duchamp to Leary to Lynch) and amid this actual moment’s generalized panic of tagged & networked photographomania
Fast-closing thunder, static-flushed full silence, rippling carpets of fireworks, just-married bombs, and brace of sharp reports, we ghosts flee boom! we flee boom! we flee!
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Living in an apartment on a busy intersection in Shanghai’s former French Concession where trucks and buses rumble and grind past at all hours amidst horn honks and break squeals (and on Saturdays the panhandling street musician’s húlúsī gourd organ), leading me to earplugs, sound-canceling headphones, ambient music, and, most recently and most successfully, the excellent collection available online of white noise, pink noise, blue noise, thunder storms, rain in the woods, rain on tin roofs, wind in the forest, wind on high dunes, wind in the arctic, crashing surf and river rapids. I am currently 04:03:42 into a looped recording of “10 Hours Rainfall w/ Distant Thunder.”
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It is a source of deep embarrassment — and therefore social silence — that as a teenager I attended the H. Roe Bartle Boy Scout Camp near Osceola, Missouri and was inducted into an invented Indian tribe called the Tribe of Mic-O-Say as a Brave in an initiation ceremony led by middle-aged and older men (Elders) and teens slightly older than I was (Warriors) who took us young Braves out into the woods away from the large bonfire – “leave this council ring!” the Medicine Man shouted after each young Brave-to-be was presented and performed an oath. Then the Brave’s runner — his chosen Warrior-mentor — ran the kid out into a spot where overnight the new Brave was to sleep “alone” in woods filled with other Braves and their Warrior minders as part of the initiation ritual.
That night, we were to meditate – we were not to speak, not with the runner nor with any other Brave, briefly fasting with only water to drink – and await a sign from the Great Spirit that would give us our Mic-O-Say name; we were also to gather some natural thing from the woods to sew into a small leather pouch with plastic line before attaching a hawk’s claw to the pouch. We wore these around our necks for the rest of camp, starting with the final night of the initiation ceremony in which we announced our new Mic-O-Say names and were blessed by a Medicine Man using a big sacred feather.
We wore loincloths over swimming trunks. My chosen name was “Thunder in the Distance.” I thought my name was pretty good but then I heard my friend Pete’s name: “Rattlesnake in the Leaves.”
I do deeply love the sound of wind in the woods on a hot and humid Missouri summer night with heat lightning flashing in the sky and occasional thunder, so far off you’re not sure at first if you’re hearing what you think you are, but near enough to register with your arm hairs as major disturbance in the atmosphere.
Needless to say, we were nearly all to a man, to a boy, ghostly white, whether in- or outside or somewhere between, even the black kids? Yes
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I’m not the only foreigner on the streets of Shanghai who finds it easy to talk to himself. Let’s stick to men. I see them often striding, sometimes meandering, but most often purposefully striding, and I see and hear them muttering to themselves. They’re usually angry-looking, sometimes confused, though maybe I’m projecting some anger or confusion of mine into their performance—I’m talking to myself and I don’t care if the whole Chinese world of Shanghai knows it—which is and isn’t performance because that nuanced and refracted self-awareness we like to imagine of the true performer is probably, I’m guessing, barely there.
When I talk to myself like this, muttering particularly about the noise and the omnipresent smoking man and the guy on the scooter who just leaned on his horn all the way through the intersection or the BMW or Audi driver making the aggressive right turn on red into the marked crosswalk with its crowd of pedestrians or the Republicans back in the US or about Obama and the NSA or the momentary urge to go full vegan at the sight of a half-dozen dead-eyed half-bald ducks on a curb or about my wife who loves Shanghai more I fear than I do I don’t know I’m doing it until it’s too late and I’ve already done at least most of it.
The worst is to let go intentionally in earshot of Chinese who you know both do and don’t understand.
The bank yesterday: Fuck, fucking goddamn fucking stupid shit-ass motherfucker. Loud enough to register. Loud enough throughout the branch. Service perks up and when service is finally done as desired, I grin like a skull and nod an awkward xièxie and stride off, embarrassed, muttering to myself half way home while passing the spike-haired boys spot-welding and smoking cheap smokes on the sidewalk in their cheap sunglasses and brand fake fake fakes.
I am a Brave in the Tribe of Mic-O-Say and I say fucking hell Jesus fucking Christ you gotta be kidding me and bùhǎoyìsi duìbuqǐ duìbuqǐ bùhǎoyìsi duìbuqǐ.