Stuff to Read

Author: gordsellar

  • Vishnu, the Maintainer, Maintains

    the grids of the leakless metal hidden in the walls now;
    they’re his domain — the pipes of a hundred thousand homes
    in the greater metropolitan area; his servants
    are many, and each armed with shining steel:

    monkey wrenches. That rhymes for him with vanara1,
    which brings old Rama to mind, and his lovely Sita.
    He wonders, over a cold beer and lunchbag curry,
    whether their love has grown clogged or enjoys good drainage.

    His own runs latterwise, for Lakshmi does the books,
    still that magnet of prosperity. She picked his vocation,
    now orders parts, cuts deals with hardware stores.
    She is as pretty as ever, though ninety pounds moreso.

    He thinks of how many times the world has spun
    since he first stepped onto it, with each turn round
    of the bolt gripping the pipe, like a gopi girl her lover’s
    flesh, or good old Krishna his songpipes back in the day.

    And on his pipewrench it is inscribed, in stately
    Sanskrit, a motto for the war against errant pipes
    and sumps: Yato Dharma Stato Jayah:
    “Where virtue is found, there too is victory.”

    1. The vanara are monkeys, specifically in this case those with whom the hero Rama was forced to ally in order to win back his bride Sita in the epic Ramayana.

  • Indra

    Sits on a the Star Chambers of a Hundred Worlds, on the War
    Councils for dozens of planets. Galactic soldier-king.
    Well, that’s what he fancies he would be, if he could.

    Lives in Wimbledon, because, as he will tell you,
    London’s the only place to get decent Indian food anymore.

    Reads magazines like International Bounty Hunter,
    Looks down at his paunch with misgivings, and at night
    he goes out to try and score some soma at a club.

    Indra didn’t used to be this way. He could have
    told you the sites of hundreds of battles, those
    he rained down on, hollered into via the wind, could’ve
    described the shape and texture of each shield on
    each soldier, its material and the color of its paint.

    Now, it’s all he can do to make an effort to watch
    those monkeys in the Pentagon, in Beijing, and sometimes call
    down a little downpour down to trick some totty into a cab.

    – 2001, Montreal

  • Kali-ma

    Oh, yes. There’s something that just tugs at him, knowing
    she’s had kids already, screamed and birthed them out
    one by one. Not that he would ever admit to it.
    Sure, the idea of her having eaten them turns his stomach.
    Yet what does he do? He picks up the phone, and calls.

    A few hours later, her knees press against his hips,
    the black leather of her thighs bouncing with the road’s
    contours, her hands misbehaving dangerously
    as he tries to steer her Harley through this distraction.

    When they get where they are going, she will smoke.
    She will drink the sorts of things his brothers don’t dare guzzle,
    and then, with a frightening look of hunger in her eyes,
    she’ll pull poor Thoth down onto her, her belly already
    swelling, making temporary room for the meat
    of their sudden, miscegenate child.

    – 2001, Montreal

  • Ganesh

    Lives in the south of France now. They don’t
    seem to notice his nose, or else they act
    as if they don’t. Maybe because his accent is
    perfect? There’s something about the French, alright.

    He is an connoisseur at wines. A professional
    gourmand, he wears the most delicate bifocals.
    Not much else to be said. He’s studying
    Basque for interest’s sake. Reads Mallarmé
    and Verlaine, perhaps a little Rimbaud. Writes
    the odd poem in his spare time, too. Sings
    along to Brassens’ milder tunes. Dates occasionally.
    Loves the countryside. Never been happier.

    At least, that’s the story his friends tell these days.

    – 2001, Montreal

  • The Deep End

    by Gord Sellar and Dabang Band

    One day, got the notion, in the ocean,
    One day, thought that he would learn to swim;
    That day, must admit he was a fool,
    That day went straight to the swimming pool…

    Signed up, took a class down at the YMCA,
    With families, children and their mothers;
    Fathers, reclining in the hot tubs and the saunas,
    And there he was among them, a pink unicorn

    Day one, shocked to see him, everybody;
    Day two, they all see him screw it up;
    Day three, gangster in class, tattooed ass;
    Day four, they go out and drink it up;
    On day five, he looks up and he sees the lifeguard dive,
    Her movements, smooth like spilling milk:
    In lane five, she makes her way from one end to the other —
    He wants to talk to her, but just then does not dare.

    sax solo

    In lane five, he looks again to see the lifeguard dive,
    Her movements, smooth like rolling clouds:
    In lane five, she makes her way from one end to the other —
    He wants to talk to her, but just then does not dare…
    He wants to talk to her, but just then does not dare.

    The deep end… the deep end… the deep end… the deep end… the deep end.

    Unlike most of my “songs”, “The Deep End” was conceived from start to finish as a song, not originally as a poem. I think this shows in the structure of the lyrics, in a positive way. In any case, the song turned out quite differently than I expected: I had in mind the tempo (and the basic drum beat) of the Belle & Sebastian song “Expectations,” but we ended up with something a lot slower and with a more chunky beat. I still think it would make a good uptempo song, though.

    I originally came up with the melody whilst showering after the swimming class I took at the YMCA in Iksan, South Korea, in 2003; I decided therefore to write the lyrics about the experience of the class (and more generally my experience as a foreigner living in Korea), as well as making it a tribute to the most unusual of the swim instructors/lifeguards at the pool. (While I didn’t fall in love with her, I thought she was cool.) There was a guy in our class who was tattooed, and many suspected he’d been a gangster at some point; I suspect it too, but it’s not like he went all Tony Soprano in front of us. (Unless you count shouting at a waitress.)

    “The Deep End” is available on the Dabang Band album Product (2004); you can find out more about the album here. Or, heck, click here to stream the song.

  • The Elvis of the Ganges, at his Height (in 1968)

    by Gord Sellar

    No more chariotside lectures for Krishna. He’s ridin’ high.

    Coat scruffed with mantric sequins, pinned by lights
    and screeching guitars to the wall, a sort of rock’n’roll insect;
    forget rivers and fiery oblation. Forget statues bleeding milk.

    He’s done his time in limos, in flower-decked tour buses,
    once kept George Harrison awake all night as he drove
    from somewhere in Italy all the way to the Western coast of France.

    He gets fan letters from teenaged girls, smeared throughout with cheap perfume.

    “If you’re not willing to fake it, you know, act a little,” he says,
    “then you need to find another line of work. If you can’t
    stand a little crappy music and bad breath, you’d better forget it!”

    Lately, he’s cutting in on the Devil’s market, swapping record deals for souls.

    Worst of all, he hates it. The music is crap, and nobody talks
    to him straight anymore. They figure him for a con man. But he’s
    never been other than what he is now. His own hair stirs his abhorration.

    But what’s he supposed to do? Business is business is business.
    It’s the fashion. And he’s damn good at it. If only it weren’t for all
    those annoying bald kids making noise in all the bloody airports.

    Must do something about that, he resolves… they could give a fellow a bad name.

    — 2001 (from The Dänikbharata)

    “The Elvis of the Ganges, at his Height (in 1968)” was published (under the title Shivaji”) in Matrix 59, Fall 2001, along with “Shivji”, as “Poems from The Dänikbharata” (for more about which, see below).

    The Dänikbharata was a series of poems I worked on in 2000-2001, in which the gods of various historical pantheons turned out, as Erich von Däniken had suggested, to be aliens who had been stranded on Earth. The tale was to focus on the gods who ended up in India, and what they had gone on to do in their long wait for rescue; the epic was to mainly concern the war between the various gods and pantheons when a rescue ship arrived, but only limited seating was available. The project is currently incomplete.

  • Shivji

    by Gord Sellar

                       The harder they fall, alright.
    Skin hard like cane reed, he squats low
    in some alleyway, syringes in his many hands,
    rubber tourniquet clenched between his teeth,
    ghee boiling hard in filthy spoons. It’s impossible to tell:
    is that his natural shade? or is the blue his withdrawal?
    Nobody can drag words back past the brink of his accent,
    not even in the shadowy corner of Kwality Tandoori
    on West 52nd; or is it in Harlem now, where he hangs,
    recounting stories of Parvathi’s lush addictions,
    explaining the roots of his interest in free-form jazz,
    the strange octopus beauty of Roland Kirk, with
    his rack of duct-taped horns across his chest, which
    convinced Shivji, eight-armed, he could do it, too.

    When he woke at the top of Mt. Kaylash,
    she was gone. He searched for eleven years,
    found her shacked up with some musclehead
    Hittite, essentially a hit-man for a small
    cartel of Egyptian demigods, trying to make a comeback.
    He left her there, in plastic flip-flops, at Giza,
    and off he went, to America, to be a jazzman.
    A tactical error. The death of one saxist Coltrane
    came in 1967. Disarray. Sleeping under peoples’ porches,
    having to play tonal in funk bands just to eat,
    solos on tunes like “Big Mama!” and “Mama Come
    and Jump Me!” and “Red Hot Big Mama Song Hyunh!”

    Eventually he sold his horns, pawned them off
    one by one. Took to drinking, syringe in hand, bitching
    at his loss of Vedic income to that slick
    bastard Krishna — “that slimy populist”, as he says.
    Too broke for ghee, doing regular unsalted
    butter in the darkness of numberless alleyways.
    Spitting randomly at Hittite-faced cabbies and paperboys,
    wishing on fire-escapes that he’d never bloody heard
    of Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Always comparing
    himself to Krishna, whose charm was always a little
    more glittery, “the Elvis of the Ganges, he were,”
    And Shiva will then point out to you, the name
    Elvis contains within it Evil in the plural.

    — 2001 (from The Dänikbharata)

    “Shivji” was published (under the title Shivaji”) in Matrix 59, Fall 2001, along with “The Elvis of the Ganges, at his Height (in 1968)”, as “Poems from The Dänikbharata,”  a project that remains unfinished, but which I haven’t given up on completely.

    As a member of Dabang Band, I performed the poem as part of our song “Shivji and the Ecstasy of Butter and Fire” on our album “Pig Over Seoul” (2002):

  • In Pursuit of the Jeonju Jew

    by Gord Sellar

    People stopped me in the street
    to suggest to me this Jeonbuk treat,
    they say it to everyone who’s new,
    “You gotta visit the Jeonju Jew.”

    I saw him in my mind, a lone Jew, all Hasidic:
    ringlets and interjections, acerbically acidic;
    walking through the shijangs, emitting shouts of “Oy!”
    The Jeonju Jew won’t notice me,
    I’m just another bloody goy.

    It took a while to penetrate
    the accent, but I got it straight
    a few weeks later. Then I knew
    they meant not Jew but Jeonju zoo.

    They took me there in soopah style,
    inside an airconn’d Tiko, while
    the weather was both bright and fair.
    I wish they’d never brought me there.

    An elephant without a trunk,
    a balding obese chimpanzee,
    two tigers sulking, in a funk,
    nothing much to see.

    A wolf lacking a lower jaw,
    a quadriplegic polar bear,
    one featherless, schitzoid macaw,
    you’re better off not going there.

    It’s not good for you…! (x3)
    To go to the Jeonju Zoo!

    I’d rather go to Gyeongijeong
    when I’ve got nowt to do,
    and wander through the crowd down there,
    and hunt for the Jeonju Jew.

    I see him in my mind, a lone Jew, all Hasidic… etc.
    … emitting shouts of joy…

    It’s just not good for you. (x3)
    To go to the Jeonju Zoo.

    – 2003, Jeonju, South Korea

    Before taking offense, allow me to explain one pertinent detail: the Korean language lacks the “z” phoneme we take for granted in English. Therefore, when Koreans attempt to pronounce the word “zoo” it often sounds like “Jew.” After I was asked a few times whether I’d visited the Jeonju Jew, I realized people were talking about a zoo. Which, by its reputation, I truly did not want to visit.

    This poem was turned into the lyrics for a song which was recorded and often performed by the band I was in at the time, Dabang Band. You can hear the song here, or see the song lyric version here.

  • The Jeonju Zoo (Song Version)

    by Gord Sellar & Dabang Band

    Verse:
    people stopped me in the street
    to suggest to me this jeonbuk treat
    they say it to everyone who’s new —
    you gotta visit the jeonju jew
    it took a while to penetrate
    the accent but i got it straight
    a few hours later then i knew
    they meant not jew but jeonju zoo

    Chorus:
    Ringlets! Black hat!
    Hasidic shouts of oy!
    Torah in hand in this unpromised land!

    verse 2:
    an elephant without a trunk
    a balding obese chimpanzee
    two tigers sulking in a funk
    nothing much to see
    a wolf lacking a lower jaw
    a quadriplegic polar bear
    one featherless schitzoid macaw
    you’re better off not going there

    chorus

    sax solo

    verse 3:
    cages, cages, row on row,
    persisting in my overflow
    no matter what you make me do,
    don’t take me to the jeonju zoo
    i’d rather go to gyeongijeong
    when I’ve got nowt to do,
    and wander through the crowd down there,
    hunting the jeonju jew

    – Dabang Band, Product (2004)

    chorus

    This is the version of my poem (viewable here) which ended up on the Dabang Band album Product. To understand the song, it is necessary to know that in Korean pronunciation of English, there is no sound like the letter Z. Koreans therefore pronounce it as a “J” sound. On my arrival in Jeonju, I was constantly being asked whether I had visited the Jeonju Jew; the more I heard about the real Jeonju Zoo (the trunkless elephant was real), the more I preferred to imagine some Orthodox Jewish man in Jeonju whom I was supposed to visit instead.

    The song was supposed to be titled “The Jeonju Jew” but in a fit of political correctness (not by me) it was changed to “The Jeonju Zoo.” (I have ignored this where I’ve posted the music online, but it all comes down to me.) It is not meant as a racist slur, as I imagine anyone who hears the song and understands the context would agree.

    This song was recorded and often performed by the band I was in at the time, Dabang Band. You can hear the song here, or see the original poem version here.

  • Spiritwood

    by Gord Sellar

    Wake up before dawn, and with any luck
    Out on the highway, we’re the only truck,
    Dust in tail-lights,
    We drive on through the night,
    Never see a light…
    But you know, it’s alright…

    And as the sun comes up, we finally stop,
    To get some coffee in a truck stop,
    The people sound strange here,
    Smell of savoured beer,
    Smile and call you “dear.”

    Look up high, at the geese up in the sky,
    They are winging their way homeward.
    Here we are, and we’ve come so very far,
    I’m sure that we’ll make Spiritwood by dawn.

    They speak with words that make no sense to you,
    And we begin to talk just like we used to do,
    Don’t want to go,
    I tell you ’bout the snow
    But I guess you’ll never know…

    Look up high, at the geese up in the sky,
    They are winging their way homeward.
    Here we are, and we’ve come so very far,
    I’m sure that we’ll make Spiritwood by dawn.

    This place I’m from that you will never see,
    This place I want to take you, there with me
    We’d drive until the end
    of night, and maybe then,
    we’d go back home again.

    Look up high, at the geese up in the sky,
    They are winging their way homeward.
    Here we are, and we’ve come so very far,
    I’m sure that we’ll make Spiritwood by dawn.

    Despite my dislike of a lot of country music, this is a sort of folksy-country-ish song I wrote for Dabang Band. Probably it was the influence of Yo La Tengo’s Ride the Tiger that got this kind of sound in my head — I vaguely remember album sounding a little country-tinged to me, something about the guitar-picking and the very simple drumming on a lot of songs, but also the singing; the album implanted a very earnest melody and a tumbling brush-snare drumbeat in my mind, and I dug out a poem that fit the meter of the tune, and which I just knew would work.

    Alas, nobody heard it but me: the song never ended up in our repertory. I had a lot of trouble communicating the bouncy country feel of the tune, and in the run-through it sounded more like some kind of love-song ballad thing, which was exactly NOT what it was supposed to sound like… but it was too late, by that point, and the song ended up in the dustbin. The tune is still clear in my head, though.

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