CDs for Lorne: Anytime

[likesthecoat]

Track 1: Couches in Alleys, Stryofoam ft. Ben Gibbard

Track 2: Hello, Major. It's Ianto. This is the poetry and pop CD, to do with whatever you like. I've collected just some songs and some poems I really like . . . I think if Dean ever heard this he'd call me a wuss again, but that's life, yeah?

Anyway. Poem the first. This is called "Road" and it's by a bloke called Don Patterson.

Traveller, your footprints are
the only path, the only track:
wayfarer, there is no way,
there is no map or Northern star,
just a blank page and a starless dark;
and should you turn round to admire
the distance that you've made today,
the road will billow into dust.
No way on and no way back,
there is no way, my comrade, trust
your own quick step, the end's delay,
the vanished trail of your own wake,
wayfarer, sea-walker, Christ.

Track 3: You, Switchfoot

Track 4: Poem the second. This is by E.E. Cummings.

pity this busy monster, manunkind,
not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)
plays with the bigness of his littleness
electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns to its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born:
pity poor flesh
and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical
ultraomnipotence.
We doctors know
a hopeless case if---
listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door;
let's go

Track 5: All My Lovin', Me First and the Gimme Gimmes (cover)

Track 6: This next one, I read a year or so ago around Valentine's Day. It stuck with me. It's called "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour" and it's by Wallace Stevens.

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one . . .
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough

Track 7: Letting the Cables Sleep, Bush

Track 8: I think this next one is strangely sad. It's called "Facts about the Moon" and it's by Dorianne Laux.

The moon is backing away from us
an inch and a half each year. That means
if you're like me and were born
around fifty years ago the moon
was a full six feet closer to the earth.
What's a person supposed to do?
I feel the gray cloud of consternation
travel across my face. I begin thinking
about the moon-lit past, how if you go back
far enough you can imagine the breathtaking
hugeness of the moon, prehistoric
solar eclipses when the moon covered the sun
so completely there was no corona, only
a darkness we had no word for.
And future eclipses will look like this: the moon
a small black pupil in the eye of the sun.
But these are bald facts.
What bothers me most is that someday
the moon will spiral right out of orbit
and all land-based life will die.
The moon keeps the oceans from swallowing
the shores, keeps the electromagnetic fields
in check at the polar ends of the earth.
And please don't tell me
what I already know, that it won't happen
for a long time. I don't care. I'm afraid
of what will happen to the moon.
Forget us. We don't deserve the moon.
Maybe we did once but not now
after all we've done. These nights
I harbor a secret pity for the moon, rolling
around alone in space without
her milky planet, her only love, a mother
who's lost a child, a bad child,
a greedy child or maybe a grown boy
who's murdered and raped, a mother
can't help it, she loves that boy
anyway, and in spite of herself
she misses him, and if you sit beside her
on the padded hospital bench
outside the door to his room you can't not
take her hand, listen to her while she
weeps, telling you how sweet he was,
how blue his eyes, and you know she's only
romanticizing, that she's conveniently
forgotten the bruises and booze,
the stolen car, the day he ripped
the phones from the walls, and you want
to slap her back to sanity, remind her
of the truth: he was a leech, a fuckup.
a little shit, and you almost do
until she lifts her pale puffy face, her eyes
two craters and then you can't help it
either, you know love when you see it,
you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull.

Track 9: Call and Answer, the Barenaked Ladies

Track 10: This one is about the sexiest thing I've ever read. It's called "The Curve" and it's by Sara Medinger.

Man comes in mostly lines
and angles.
But there’s a certain curve I know,
a certain curve
where hip meets thigh,
that only curves so much
on man.
A curve deserving
a thousand tiny kisses
for every nerve.
This curve, this concave
curve of skin – hotter
than stomach, closer
than knees.
A shallow sunken
finger-walkable road,
This unnamed curve,
this slight and manly
gentle curve.
A most intimate curve
caressable curve,
a shadow place for me to lie.
This curve forgets
all other angles.

Track 11: Street Map, Athelete

Track 12: These last two are short so I'm not going to break them up. The first is by a Persian poet named Hafez who wrote about seven hundred years ago.

Even after all this time
The sun never says to the earth,
"You owe me."

Look what happens with
A love like that,
It lights the whole sky.

And the second one is by a Japanese poet called Izumi Shikibu, who wrote over a thousand years ago.

Even if I now saw you
Only once,
I would long for you
Through worlds,
Worlds.

I think we modern people forget sometimes that we didn't invent love.

Track 13: Sword and Shield, Sister Hazel

Track 14: Dw i’n dy garu di, Lorne. Da boch chi.