Discover Top Posts Tagged with #tone dogs

tone dogs -- salvatore

#1990s #rock #indie #tone dogs

Salvatore 2008-01-01 TONE DOGS ( Amy Denio, Fred Chalenor, and Will Dowd) to hear ...

#tone dogs #videos music #music videos #amy denio #fred chalenor

I self-published Tone Dogs in April 2014. It's the first chapbook I've ever made. The process was pretty terrifying. I wanna do it again. If you'd like a digital or meatspace copy of the whole chapbook (which doesn't have the formatting errors a lot of the posts here have) send me an email at [email protected].

#tone dogs

CITY POEM

there are reports, sometimes, of people who wake up in the middle of the night with electricity like lightning all pouring out of their mouths onto bedsheets or couches or wherever they were sleeping that night. cats are terrified and dogs bark through the bathroom doors where they are locked and if they have birds or tortoises unspeakable things happen but the people go to sleep and toss from side to side or catch fire and walk down the hall of their second floor apartment

to sit in a chair reupholstered and just just

cling

to the armrests and i am

one of those people

i can imagine the city like a child’s fist nothing to wish or ask for like it beating something into bark or long thin rolls of paper to bone or bloody hanging skins it is pathological but i am in love

with you, city

like bird’s wing

like bone like bent up like a nail on rock and all the little caves there like all of you

i went walking one day and a woman old and portuguese with her hair under a black shawl watched me from her window i have to thank you for that i really do that that excruciating that chaos all the minds shuffled beautiful like a clean space of boxes and parcels and as a child looking at those aisles i had some idea

city

––city

the first time i saw an newborn i was shocked by all the black hair i can imagine in against flesh and clear liquid pus

––city

that is only what i can explain

delivery of that child that hair

broken windows all down governor

screaming

boy/girl beautiful

binary thing

sun-aged

recomposted

scrolls of bone

age of neon

corner after haircut

park

the end of blackstreet boulevard and hope street

city asks things like what do my rivers smell like or what do i need or who are you and i lie politely i lead it into its friendly lonely 2 am riot broken up the next morning by police who embrace mothers and children while their faces are lit by this invisible fire. how do i play the city asks when i’m naked and sweating because it’s so damn hot outside and it’s 4:30 in the morning but somehow somehow light and when i rub my fingers together rolls of black dirt come away onto that yellow-white sheet which is yellow-white from my sweat

i explain at the intersection of ives and east manning

i am explained walking up angell beneath flowers and leaves

i explain, the one time, just once, when you sat on the curb there were little bits of leaves’ veins next to your feet but it was just once because who sits on the curb anymore. you get asked questions from the city and like a kid you can make shit up or cradle its head or lift it up or beat it or smile and it will have its answer

you could walk away from all that

airplanes buzz its skin

there are a hundred blocks between you and your best friend

there are three between you and a girl made of iron

there are five between you and your school

there are twenty between you and the backseat of your brother’s car

there are fifteen between you and the thing you found come up from its ocean’s floor

there are only six between you and that ocean

you could hide under the wings of those airplanes

an evening in summer or winter

ecstatic because you are finally home

airplanes like children-under-sheets

watch cities’ corporate organs

move by and dig up the pavement

and let the world there move

you watch all of this beneath

a blanket beneath orange light

beneath the cherry tree outside

your window the moon white

cracking plaster brown

hardwood floors you watch it

from your desk movement into

the world the chance of it

between the fabric of your

bed and the wall roll over

sleep the dreams violence there

there there long stretches of

fabric

white cracked plaster

you are happy

#tone dogs #poetry

COELACANTH

will they discriminate my body

found on the seafloor

filled with fat

i find it in the meat,

cooked for me by a man

with a skull wiped clean

and shining

from my fork

there is clear, yellow grease

i mop it up with my bread

it finds me in the center of a street, hot, dark, below what i own

which is a few separate towers, between them kingdoms

of a dozen different characters like me.

i stop at one of their corners, i see Christmas lights in a window

of a house that is otherwise dark.

i take a picture

my foot hurts

i wonder when it will give birth

whoever it is for

that house

who

they sleep on the roof

their eyes and hands are bandaged

their hair is beautiful

what it finds, it finds me

it is too old for a jaw

from its back is the fat of my ears

if it has a back. how did it get here

i wonder, touching it, bending over, my foot,

my eyes, drying, it stares up and out,

the world it knows would be as dark

as that window, as much love

as the fat i mix with my tapered hands.

it should be gone by the morning

i turn to see what it is looking at

#tone dogs #prose

POEM FOR GIRL MADE OF LEAVES

i am tempted to say your guts are like i'm tempted i'm tempted i'm tempted by things like your guts are ribbons your guts are the wound towers of sand i found drawn on the beach left overnight there –––> the other night i went out for a walk and found that the wind that consumed this city was absent from my streetcorner, the one place i did not want to be, and that the clouds and the moon and the streetlights made it look like early evening and in the noise i could hear bells far away and figures sprinted between the shrubs and trees all dark all fleeting me underneath my streetlight clouds moon making it look like early evening i try to explain this to you over the packetswitching networks that thread the deep dark above streetlight –––> cloud –––> moon –––> i type out the first paragraph and close that branch to you and forget about it and go back to sleep your guts are you on the carpet of your basement and your guts are also you unfurling a book of drawings and your guts are also you crying on the streetcorner –––> probably not too different from mine –––> and your guts are also hot food in the noise and rush of an east coast city and though your guts are not the snakes drawn in the margins of paper though your guts are not tipler cylinders and minkowski butterflies and asymptotes and curves retreating into that deep dark –––> streetlight –––> cloud –––> moon –––> they are very much like all of that the other night i read about telescopes that could look into those packetswitching networks threading the deep dark and these telescopes could see data the switching of packets curves minkowski's butterflies –––> light from here to there and that is what i dreamt of that night and though i never dream of you anymore i can imagine the rivers you look at –––> edge of the beach the life beneath your feet the continent beyond your own –––> water –––> mountain –––> and you are gone gone gone except your telescopes pointing inwards the branches from your fingertips the light on your face in the dark of the room looking through those curves that beach –––> hair –––> girl made of leaves i called you –––> who were those sprinting packs who came and went past my home that night i went out for a walk –––> was i too crying on that streetcorner –––> probably not too different from yours –––> under leaves like hair –––> life under feet on edge of ocean –––> life on edge of paragraph –––> that is as much as i can get from your guts –––> windy city –––> asymptote –––> hexagram –––> packetswitcher –––>

#tone dogs #poetry

TONE DOGS

you remind me of a hyena you remind me of a lightning stick passed between tired figures drawn out in gold and turquoise and hubble red, hubble the first god of your pantheon the way you are stretched and scooped, the way your skin is clear on a Sunday morning, laying down in a booth at Dot’s Diner and asking for tomato juice you remind me you remind me of a book i read on a plane above the prairies of one of your constituent selves, where a character steps on a landmine and turns yellow like the fat on your bones like bubbles i pick it apart with my hands and they turn clean when i wake in the morning, you turn your head to a statue of ganesh, you have very white skin, i try to shake you when i realize my thinking is yours, i miss being called fuckhead from a passing driver, i miss touching his or her mouth, i miss fitting into the panes of their car, in an alleyway walking back from work stinking of fish maybe eleven at night yeah i come across graffiti made from the head of a lizard you plucked from your hills, between rocks

CURSE YOUR PARENTS!

BETRAY YOUR FRIENDS!

SLEEP WITH WOMEN!

i laugh and go to bed i do it out of careful respect i bag that lizard’s head and bury it in the gravel outside my window where i am sure someone will find it and love it a little more than me i think nothing about it not then not until now. i think about what i will dream one night. i cross the street and scream as i cross it. i am shirtless at two am. i am panting on grass. you come down to me, you stand over me, your nikes are very dirty they have been in your family for generations and you you you are the object of all my desire and balled up incandescent exploding heartsun sailed off the shore of a childhood home, too large for my mind right then, fumbling with knots, ten, eleven, grinning, throwing myself into the pond without knowing what exactly it was, what i was thinking, what the kernel black and white and huge and whole needed, what machine it spoke through. you are very much made in a particle collider. you will decay in a fraction of a fraction of a second a bearded man will say so. you are very much, very much, thank you

for three days Chautauqua stayed in a room rented out to him by three brothers. they rented it cheap––he had known them from when they had all been kids. he hadn’t seen them in a while though, so when he stepped through the door they reintroduced themselves.

there was the photographer, who was oldest, who had nothing to say because he had said a lot. he had worked menial jobs. one night he went to sleep and when he woke up he was married to a bosnian sniper who did his or her business killing tourists to and from strip malls and on airplanes because he or she had long since had his eyes and muscles replaced with the newest quasiceramic screaming steel and golden blood and he or she could do shit like that. they were married for twenty years and the sniper killed maybe ten thousand a year and they lived pretty ok and had kids and one night the photographer laid down next to his piece of mexican bioengineering and woke up back in his room, window draped with a yellow flag, walls flanked by golden swords, and he had somehow become a photographer and that was that.

the second oldest brother was the cook. he had strangled a bicyclist one morning out of sheer horror and spent the next five years of his life on a penal colony covered in bugs and lizards and huge loving sloth-things before he seduced the warden who was a beautiful chef besides being the warden and from this warden learned everything he’d ever need to know about cooking. he escaped when he cooked his way through the chains and cooked all those bugs and lizards and sloth-things to keep them from sucking down his skin and while the brothers of all these little creatures ate their siblings he stole out on a barrel and floated across the atlantic ocean and up the street to the building that he would turn into his restaurant. the oldest brother had careful moustache and sideburns. this brother was unshaven. if he wanted to talk to you he’d inch over and stare at the ground and make gestures to tell you what was the business. when Chautauqua asked why he had killed that bicyclist that fine spring morning (something you could never have, you hyena i sleep in, chewing you) and he replied he had done it out of sheer horror Chautauqua threw back his head and laughed.

the third brother had been someone before he tore his way out of his someone’s skin and laid there on cool linoleum in the walk-in freezer of his brother’s restaurant, heaving. he had a beard, full and dark, even though he was the youngest. he was the wildman. he was made of blunt guts and arrowheads. he killed all tribes that stood before him. he wore a motorcycle jacket made with the skin of a real horse. he had nothing unkind to say because he could not think unkindly. he had no story besides that which he told Chautauqua on the side of the creek, throwing stones at the bugs who lived their lives on fibers and skein

“i will be a ninja i will be a creature of molten iron and clinging vine i will love all i will be feared i will suck at my mother’s breast until she gives way into the all-seeing totality of this river, that rock, my shoes, dirty converse, dirty nike, you son of a bitch”

Chautauqua rented out their attic room for three days. three days three brothers it was like a fairy tale. he wandered the city between their meals and stories and walks by that iron creek. their world was iron but it was good. it was kind. Chautauqua had been meat the first day and branches the second and spiders the third and the drunker he got the bigger or smaller the spiders got, the more cooked the meat got, the more blustery the branches got. he was always drinking. he saw art in museums and listened to music on the hillside of the corner, charging with his bayonet. he was back in a familiar place. how they had come here, photographer, cook, and wildman, he did not know. maybe they were not real, but Chautauqua had never met anyone who was not real. maybe a mad prophet lying on a couch listing off all the reasons art was dead could lift a finger and model the crainial septum of those three, but that mad prophet was too busy with the thinness of his face, of his fingers, of the rings crying off their tips. how’s that for love? in those three days Chautauqua was a creature of love. he was very much a creature. legs came out of his throat, chitinous, to scoop at food, to kiss a taxi driver, to love, he was very loving.

what do you think of that? the figures go back into their tents and trailers, they run from things high up in the sky love is mostly love and things on textbook margins what butterflies minkowski would dream of. all the tiles under feet could not explain why i still try to know you––you’ll never grow old. you are too friendly. you will welcome me back. how do i feel about that. you have no twilight for me, you have a sunrise and warm food. only at the hills by the shores of all your world will you realize the ground beneath you held guns and close-breathing armies. you are a boy wishing he was in the cathedral city, the tin city, the ocean city, the reformed city, the word there, spoken in the cafes and bars that spill in quarter-time onto the street, through the parks where animals talk, where no one is looking, where the boy leans in closer to the dirt and scoops it on his face and tastes the bugs writhing there, even as they eat his teeth

#tone dogs #poetry

DOLMEN MUSIC

you spent the night in a tunnel beneath the highway

from a plane you can see the gas rigs the flood ditches

the electric boxes with a bolt cutter you could break their locks

inside might be your younger self curled up around its computer its book

let me tell you what i saw from the plane let me tell you it will say

as a child standing before your new home

you try to tell your mother that you feel homeless

but more likely you will see an ocean of wires more likely

is the cop who comes out of the dirt to call you son

to tell of the dream that led you here yellow eyed