The following lyrics are from the second half of Mark Kozelek’s song Lone Star off his album Common As Light and Love Are Red Valleys of Blood released tomorrow [and is streamed out there if you want to hear].

The whole, across two cds, is a set of mesmerising narratives, most rooted in the reality of the past year and ‘found’ on his travels and gigging. The majority are real life murder mysteries, it seems, but either within this or separate, many of the spoken [some rapped] narratives reflect powerfully on contemporary America and Kozelek’s ruminations on this.

I present this excerpt recalling my previous reflections on this blog about the literary power of song lyrics. It isn’t so much the literariness, or otherwise, of the following that matters, however: they provoke in their storytelling prowess and to listen to the album is like listening to a reading and I think this is an important conversation from an interesting artist.

When Donald Trump becomes president
Blame it on Facebook, Yelp and reality TV
And Twitter and Uber and Google and video games and every other thing that has turned this country
Into a bunch of dumbed-down slaves of technology
We wanted dumb headlines, well baby, we got it
We wanted instant gratification, right well baby, we got it
We wanted stupid entertainment, baby, we asked for it

This dumb motherfucker will be on the news every fucking day
And we willed it
He is a hundred percent full-on our creation
He is proof that we choose apps over education
He is proof of our mind-numbing Internet obsession
He’s the result of our dumb-fuck-starin’-at-our-phones attention span limitations

People sittin’ around hatin’ on Donald Trump
We can’t face it, but we asked for this junk
Not directly, but we fail to see
How our stupidity willed him into candidacy

Go ahead and take your smartphone out
Send a tweet to the world and pout pout pout
We planted the seed, and it’s come to its fruition
Make no mistake, Donald Trump is our creation
Go ahead and have your ‘Oh my fucking God’ reaction
When he’s elected, threaten to move to Vancouver, Canada, or Athens, Greece
As George Carlin said one night, “I believe you have to be asleep
To believe in the American Dream”
So all of us zone the fuck out a minute, get some popcorn, watch some Trump
Check your Facebook and keep up with the Kardashians

The recent twitter spat between JK Rowling and Piers Morgan has been an entertaining battle fought in the digital Colosseum. A bloodless war in any real sense, I think the adjective could be aptly applied to Morgan himself, a man whose caustic and calculated jibes reflect a person operating entirely on bile.

But people will have taken their sides before the latest arguing began, so this brief observation isn’t intended to try and persuade on a preferred choice for this bifurcated pair – the Righteous and the Redneck. I do want to diverge from what would be my default position and state that I do agree with one – and only one – of Morgan’s tweets in this exchange, and a stance he has taken previously: his argument that critics of Trump should stop comparing the Donald with Hitler makes fundamental sense to me.

I say this not because I in any way endorse Morgan’s self-seeking, sanctimonious and sycophantic tweets [and other endorsements] about Trump, but because in making that comparison, anyone doing so would undermine the horror of Hitler’s legacy by drawing a parallel with a President – dangerous, yes, largely through those evil people pulling his strings – who is essentially dumb and, if current events continue, is imploding [oh how a prefix is crucial in this case] because of his abject incompetence. He is not of himself the ruthless and homicidal tyrant. He is not even with his racist and sexist and other vile proclivities able to destroy the better part of democracy and liberal sensibilities that continue to exist with inherent integrity in America.

By all means, anyone and everyone should tell Morgan to fuck off, though better still completely ignore him [excusing this brief deflection from such good advice], or deliver a decisive blow as in Rowling’s most recent hilarious triumph where she tweeted an accolade about herself for Morgan to subsequently traduce, and then for him to subsequently discover he had delivered the accolade himself. Morgan is without doubt a bloated and odious individual, pumped with his own bile by the Katie Hopkins School of Outrageous Outbursts Full of Crap.

Let’s just wipe him from out shoes and walk on.

From the window I could see her bend to the roses
holding close to the bloom so as not to
prick her finger. With the other hand she clips, pauses and
clips, more alone in the world
than I had known. She won’t
look up, not now. She’s alone
with roses and with something else I can only think, not
say. I know the names of those bushes

given for our late wedding: Love, Honor, Cherish –
this last the rose she holds out to me suddenly, having
entered the house between glances. I press
my nose to it, draw the sweetness in, let it cling – scent
of promise, of treasure. My hand on her wrist to bring her close,
her eyes green as river-moss. Saying it then, against
what comes: wife, while I can, while my breath, each hurried petal
can still find her.

Suppose I say summer,
write the word “hummingbird”,
put it in an envelope,
take it down the hill
to the box. When you open
my letter you will recall
those days and how much,
just how much, I love you.

Just when he had given up thinking
he’d ever write another line of poetry,
she began brushing her hair.
And singing that Irish folk song
he liked so much.
The one about Napoleon and
his “bonnie bunch of roses, oh!”

This is a wonderfully elusive text, but it would seem the text is primarily about the inability to pin down meanings, so this is precisely the point/reflection: language is elusive, whether that is in talking about/in the world today, or just is, is a second-language, is interpretation, is the vernacular that does not fit expectation/etiquette, the playfulness of phonetics, and mis-hearing, mis-typing, mis-speaking, mis-teriousness, misspelling.

It is all about word/s and how we and machinery [in its broadest sense] define or control or alter or delete meaning. I hope that is a meaningful summation.

There is throughout a reading a sense of dislocation and disruption, whether this is in one’s understanding and/or speaking; or, in experiencing emotion, like love, so in this respect there are conventional themes alongside the unconventional.

Above all, the writing is experimental, though I do dislike the distancing this implies: how can any language writing perceptively about the world today not engage in alternatives to the conventional? In a world of rampant alternative facts, the poet needs to keep pace with other linguistic inroads to what is. Outroads? I think you get the idea.

The text is playful too. I believe there is plenty of teasing in the constantly shifting telling – to keep us engaged, to keep us on our toes, to keep us eluded.

The book’s opening poem Ayuda illustrates much of what I have mentioned [and this with two others can be read here at Knives Forks and Spoons Press],

I thought at first this was spoken by the central persona for the whole, but I don’t believe this is the case – there seem to be many other voices speaking/spoken about throughout the collection. But we do see here the engagement with an ever-shifting language and meaning, for speaker and reader, so we are all lost in a word now and in further poems. There are the verbal miscues of tols/tools, which is realistic enough in a persona speaking a ‘foreign’ language, and then there is the writer’s playfulness with under-stand/over-stand, and then the Poe-hams about love, if they are about love rather than being lost.

I don’t know. I don’t care that I don’t know.

Later in the book, in a storyline that has unravelled with the most elusive of clues [Dudley also writes thriller/crime novels….], or which has whilrled in dan generous spirals of many, we do come across an anchor of sorts, the poem Hope, though the importance/success of this human ambition is, as expected, and mimicked in its linguistic expression, thwarted:

And this leads into a poem titled cost-benefit where not only the language we write/speak/can’t speak but also print becomes a challenge to understanding and meaning, though

CAPITALISATION  is a dictator

does indeed convey its full meaning in the context of

This book is challenging to read but all the more relevant and engaging for this. There is so much cohesion in the dislocation, in fact, and perhaps that paradox is what resonates most in this experimental writing – and gives the very term a meaningfulness it deserves.

Highly recommended. Buy here. £7 UK; £11 outside UK

I know it is unlikely that Trump drafts tweets, as this implies an awareness of a desire to be, at the very least, accurate as a writer, but also possessing an appreciation of the wider significance, as POTUS, in not making the simplest of mistakes, yet I like to imagine that at his first stab he had finished this tweet with STEAK!:

I looked for Birmingham and found

a rub of quintessentially English
forested country
remote and marginal meaning
the grassroots of being

I looked for Birmingham and found

eavesdropping in the Domesday
Roman conquest of hope
air ever-changing
tree felling appeal

I looked for Birmingham and found

modern humans
the Plateau of can goods
Beormingahām beginning
primary people legacy

I looked for Birmingham and found

Edgbaston in its AD
many burnt mounds
a celebration of free
progressive importance

I looked for Birmingham and found

early human Britain
artefacts suggesting names
hierarchies of the established
collaboration in a blossom

I looked for Birmingham and found

heavily bombed foundations
an economy dominated by people
a beautiful leading to the clearance
culinary scenes

I looked for Birmingham and found

river valleys of the tribal
our world’s past
cultural pluralism in bloom
transition and growth of a period

I looked for Birmingham and found

a built-up area
capability
an influx of the stylish
digbeth dining

I looked for Birmingham and found

the Guarded Font
Sherlock seeding roots
Highfield on its high
a Ring of Arden trees Lording

I looked for Birmingham and found

the dialect of its name
an infrastructure of planners
a sector of service
a fabric of shaken privilege

I looked for Birmingham and found

the stretching of forges and furnaces
a single bulk commodity of creativity
a wide variety of specialised
exceptional levels of the heart