charity barn poems

 a month or two ago i raised money for bail funds by offering to write a barn poem for every $5 someone else donated. they were, on average, written with the person in mind, based on things i know about them, or things we have talked about before. i had to write ~75 barn poems. i am sharing seven of them here:

 

Barn Poem for Cavin B. Gonzalez 1

we slathered up a pig in nacho cheese instead of mud

we had to open the windows in the barn

well, we didn’t have to

but it was starting to smell pretty bad

worse than usual

a cheesy, piggy funk

i mean, it wasn’t that bad, tbh

could have been worse

i expected much worse

you can barely smell it now

so, uh, are you still interested?

please buy this barn

Barn Poem for Alec Sugar 2

we follow the sludgy doom riffs out of town

louder and louder

the weed stink also louder

(is that why they call it ‘loud’? i don’t know anything about weed. except the smell, i know that)

the drums rumbling through our bones

the riffs – sheets of viscous rain

(i don’t like similes in poems

so i rewrote that line to be a metaphor^^)

the growl, the lick

the doom tongue lapping us up

oh yeah, babbyy

maybe we’re high already

we hold hands until we don’t

it felt nice but i don’t need to talk about it if you don’t

you still ask where it could be coming from

like yo don’t know, but we both know

we’ve been to that barn before

and we’ll be there soon

and we’ll come back again

ok. it’s a promise. pinky swear.

Barn Poem for Chris Dankland 1

took my metal detector back out to the desert

dug up old barns

barn after barn after barn

stacked them in a loose pile as the sun beat down

i sweat through my clothes digging up barns

i drank all of my water digging up barns

my mind was empty

my arms were sore

the barns all grimaced against the dunes –

an ever-growing pile of skulls

no, wait, they were barns

i got heat stroke but

i’m pretty sure they were barns

Barn Poem for Chris Dankland 2

competitive barn racing –

illegal in most states

often violent, brutal

a showcase of the limits of our humanity

what’s that movie about the, like, the rolly derby kinda sport

like on roller blades but people die

there was that scene where the protagonist begrudgingly snaps some dude’s neck on a railing or something

fuck what was that movie?

anyway, competitive barn racing is a lot like that

people carry knives, usually, for example

and there is often very little racing

it’s mostly a knife thing

Barn Poem for Todd Snider 29

mark linkous performed under the name sparklehorse

he somehow had a major record deal

he did heroin and passed out on tour once

pinned his legs underneath his torso

something about when that happens and you move your legs finally

there’s a release of some built-up mineral, or something

it can kill you

it didn’t kill him

but he couldn’t use his legs for a while

he went on tour in a wheel chair

he recorded a sad album

well, all his albums after that were sad, to be fair

but that one, good morning, spider

he recorded that one in a barn apparently

i just looked it up

maybe i knew that, maybe that’s why i started writing about him

once he sang about an apple bed

which was a term he’d made up to refer to a moss-covered rock

one he knew in childhood

he wanted to go back to that apple bed

he also sang about horses

a horse, a horse / my kingdom for a horse

that’s a shakespeare reference

and it’s the first line on his first song on his first album

he also had his heart broken

probably many times, but there was a last time

after that time, he went into a public park with a rifle and shot himself in the chest

imagine that – a rifle

on the song about the apple bed he has a drum sample that sounds like a distant gunshot

i used to get teary-eyed when i heard it

this was in the context of his death – he had already died by the time i first heard the song

the last lines on the last song of his first album are yes your hair smells like sunshine today / gasoline horses will take us away and probably the last line he ever recorded, on his 2009 collaborative ep with Fennesz, is goodnight, sweetheart

 

Barn Poem for Donald Ryan 1

the most luxurious barn life

hammocks and heat

one of those rainforest showers

and only the choicest of hays

hell yeah

this kicks ass

Barn Poem for Todd Snider 2

how many barns

until we no longer need the word

until that’s all there is

the barn as background

as foreground

past, present, future

nothing but barn

and we can just move on