Dinosaur Junior, David Herbert Richards Lawrence, (and) Cyanide & Happiness

Best Experienced With: Dinosaur Junior; Out There

(Please right click on the link below to open the suggested background music for this evening’s poetry, comic, and musical gathering. This is Number 197 for Mind of Mully Biz Haus Shoppe. Number 200 will be eponymous)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z81LcFhmqP4

The first time I heard Dinosaur Junior, I thought of DH Lawrence’s poetry because Dinosaur Junior’s music is like placing DH Lawrence poetry against a backdrop of screaming electric guitars and then slashing the pallete with razor blades. As Spin magazine once said on its cover: “J Mascis is God”.

Amen

DH Lawrence (1885-1930). Boo ya

Wild Things in Captivity

Wild things in captivity
while they keep their own wild purity
won't breed, they mope, they die.

All men are in captivity,
active with captive activity,
and the best won't breed, though they don't know why.

The great cage of our domesticity
kills sex in a man, the simplicity
of desire is distorted and twisted awry.

And so, with bitter perversity,
gritting against the great adversity,
they young ones copulate, hate it, and want to cry.

Sex is a state of grace.
In a cage it can't take place.
Break the cage then, start in and try.

I Am Like a Rose:

I am myself at last; now I achieve

My very self, I, with the wonder mellow,

Full of fine warmth, I issue forth in clear

And single me, perfected from my fellow.

Here I am all myself. No rose-bush heaving

Its limpid sap to culmination has brought

Itself more sheer and naked out of the green

In stark-clear roses, than I to myself am brought.

The Appeal

You, Helen, who see the stars
As mistletoe berries burning in a black tree,
You surely, seeing I am a bowl of kisses
Should put your mouth to mine and drink of me.

Helen, you let my kisses steam
Wasteful into the night's black nostrils; drink
Me up, I pray; oh you, who are Night's bacchante,
How can you from my bowl of kisses shrink?

Gloire de Dijon

When she rises in the morning
I linger to watch her;
She spreads the bath-cloth underneath the window
And the sunbeams catch her
Glistening white on the shoulders,
While down her sides the mellow
Golden shadow glows as
She stoops to the sponge, and her swung breasts
Sway like full-blown yellow
Gloire de Dijon roses.

She drips herself with water, and her shoulders
Glisten as silver, they crumple up
Like wet and falling roses, and I listen
For the sluicing of their rain-dishevelled petals.
In the window full of sunlight
Concentrates her golden shadow
Fold on fold, until it glows as
Mellow as the glory roses.