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The Haunting of D.B.

Townes has come back to haunt Dead Beat. You may have noticed.

This from Wiki:

Born in Fort Worth, Texas to an oil-wealthy family, he traveled during his youth around Texas and Colorado. He was the third-great-grandson of Isaac Van Zandt, a prominent leader of the Republic of Texas. Van Zandt County in east Texas was named after his family in 1848.
Van Zandt was being groomed for Texas governorship, but he dropped out of college in the 1960s after being inspired by singer-songwriters and deciding to pursue a singing career. He was very intelligent and was diagnosed manic-depressive in his early twenties. He was treated with insulin shock therapy, which erased much of his long-term memory. His lack of memory and his mental condition contributed to both the passion and sense of isolation evident in his songs.

This from Dead Beat: "Pancho and Lefty" will not just haunt you. It will dig up your grave and lie down next to your bones.

Townes Was A Ghost

He was going into the DTs in the hospital. They took him out of the hospital so he could drink. They had to do it. He wouldn't have even had a chance if they had left him in there. They didn't know he was going away. They had tried to dry him out years before and it almost done him in. They were warned never to try and dry him out again or let him go without booze. That sounds strange but you can really take addiction that far. Townes was a ghost. Even when he was young he was a ghost. A beauty

Leonard Cohen Interview, 1994 (Part 1)

Talk to me, Leonard. One last time.

Leonard Cohen to Play Seven Sisters Falls Community Club

So Dead Beat gets in line for his ticket to Lenny. The man himself surprised just about everyone in Canada by playing an intimate gig in Fredericton. Dead Beat of course knows better. If D.B. had not recently moved from the small village of Seven Sisters Falls on the Whitemouth river in Manitoba, the man would have been playing the Seven Sisters Falls Community Club. Nevertheless, as a mark of respect, Ol' D.B. got in line and nabbed himself a few tickets.

Can We Change Our Minds?

Stick With The Devil You Know

One we were trying to get rid of; one who will succeed him; and one who knows better.

We are a gullible lot, the Irish. Stick with the devil you know.

A Tan Puck Goat - English Translation

For Mad Bertie, a translation:

1] As I set out with me pike in hand

To oldd Dromore to join a meithil (work gang),

Who should I meet but a tan puck goat

And he's roaring mad.

Chorus]Aill-il-lu puill-il-iu - Aill-il-lu it's the mad puck goat.

Aill-il-lu puill-il-iu - Aill-il-lu it's the mad puck goat.

2] He chased me over bush and weed

And thru the bog the running proceeded,'

Til he caught his horns in a clump of gorse

And on his back I jumped unheeded.

3] There was ne'er a rock with no passage through

Which he did not jump, and me like Eddie Macken.

But when he leaped clean down Faill Breach

I felt like a load of old wet sacking.

4] When the sergeant stood in Rochestown

With a force of guards to apprehend us

The goat he tore his trousers down

And made rags of his breeches and new suspenders

5] In Dingle the following afternoon

The parish priest came to call us to order.

And he swore from the pulpit each Sunday in June

T'was the devil on the back of his old grandfather.

Ailliliu ta an puc ar buile

Well gosh darn it, but that Bakin Rapscallion has to get in on the act. Not alone does he have the gall to leave a comment on The Friendship of Poetry, but he asks me, "What song(s) will you be posting for the out-going Bertie Ahern?"

Dirges, my friend, and if not, patriotic fight songs with mad ferocious goats:

Ag gabháil dom sior chun Droichead Uí Mhóradha

Píce im dhóid 's mé ag dul i meithil

Cé casfaí orm i gcuma ceoidh

[gach duine] Ach pocán crón is é ar buile...

[curfá]Ailliliú, puilliliú, ailliliú tá an puc ar buile!

Ailliliú, puilliliú, ailliliú tá an puc ar buile!

[aonréad 2]Do ritheamar trasna trí ruillógach,

Is do ghluais an comhrac ar fud na muinge,

Is treascairt do bhfuair sé sna turtóga[g.d.]

Chuas ina ainneoin ina dhrom le fuinneamh...
[curfá]

[aonréad 3]

Níor fhág sé carraig go raibh scót ann

Ná gur rith le fórsa chun mé a mhilleadh,

S'Ansan sea do cháith sé an léim ba mhó.[g.d.]

Le fána mhór na Faille Bríce...

[curfá]

[aonréad 4]Bhí garda mór i mBaile an Róistigh

Is bhailigh fórsa chun sinn a chlipeadh

Do bhuail sé rop dá adhairc sa tóin ann[g.d.]

S'dá bhríste nua do dhein sé giobail...
[curfá]

[aonréad 5]

I nDaingean Uí Chúis le haghaidh an tráthnóna

Bhí an sagart paróiste amach 'nár gcoinnibh

Is é dúirt gurbh é an diabhal ba Dhóigh leis[g.d.]

A ghaibh an treo ar phocán buile...
[curfá]

The Friendship of Poetry

Brave - by Terrence Young

We were looking at the moon, a full one it seemed, though there
was some discussion about that, about which day precisely and for

how long, until it was decided it was okay to say the moon was
full as long as we knew we might be mistaken, a compromise

which satisfied everybody and allowed us to return to our quiet
lunar observations while a CD of Latin music played through the

outside speakers, each of the songs full, too, of swooping, senseless
lyrics that probably wouldn’t have made us want to cry if we’d known

what they were saying, but we didn’t, content, as we were with the
moon, to act on empirical facts alone—what looked full, what

sounded sad. The sea battered Mexico’s volcanic coast like a
ruminant horned beast that refused to give up the fight. Across the

bay, a flag we originally thought the size of a soccer field hung in
the moonlit air, not fluttering as flags are said to do in a breeze, but

coiling and uncoiling the way a snake might if it were flattened out
to the thickness of silk and suspended from a pole. These three

things—the rising moon, the waves, the undulations of the flag—
didn’t bring to mind anything so grand as Arnold’s “ebb and flow

of human misery,” but aligned seaward as we all were on our chaiselounges—
my son, my daughter, my wife and I—our legs extended,

backs upright, heads tilted to the sky, I couldn’t help thinking—maybe
it was the Spanish refrain, I don’t know, some hint of a hopeless cause

like love or war about to begin—that the four of us were courageous,
though not in the way heroes are said to be courageous, those people

who snatch small children from debris in the middle of swollen rivers,
but brave as my mother used the term on those occasions when another

pet sank beneath the soil of our back garden, or when on a morning
of rain and gloom I walked out the front door to school, lunch kit in

hand, the drawstrings of my hood pulled tight around my face, another
pointless day with the substitute teacher. “You’re a brave boy,” she’d

say, and I believed her, as I believed my family was brave simply for
sitting there on that tropical evening, like passengers on an ocean liner

who had left behind a country on the brink of ruin only to discover there
was no safe port left in the world, no haven that would take them in.

Speaking of Song

Well Dead Beat said his goodbyes to Patricia and Terrence Young over wine and song. And speaking of song:


Ruin and Beauty - by Patricia Young

It's so quiet now the children have decided to stop
being born. We raise our cups in an empty room.
In this light, the curtains are transparent as gauze.
Through the open window we hear nothing--
no airplane, lawn mower, no siren
speeding its white pain through the city's traffic.
There is no traffic. What remains is all that remains.

The brick school at the five points crosswalk
is drenched in morning glory.
Its white flowers are trumpets
festooning this coastal town.
Will the eventual forest rise up
and remember our footsteps? Already
seedlings erupt through cement,
crabgrass heaves through cracked marble,
already wolves come down from the hills
to forage among us. We are like them now,
just another species looking to the stars
and howling extinction.

They say the body accepts any kind of sorrow,
that our ancestors lay down on their stomachs
in school hallways, as children they lay down
like matches waiting for a nuclear fire.

It wasn't supposed to end like this:
all ruin and beauty, vines waterfalling down
a century's architecture; it wasn't supposed to end
so quietly, without fanfare or fuss,
a man and woman collecting rain in old coffee tins. Darling,
the wars have been forgotten.
These days our quarrels are only with ourselves.
Tonight you sit on the edge of the bed loosening your shoes.
The act is soundless, without future
weight. Should we name this failure?
Should we wake to the regret at the end of time
doing what people have always done
and say it was not enough?