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LIT on LIT #3

by lit on lit mixed tapes

supported by
Graham Johnson
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Graham Johnson Brilliant poetry with great lo-fi instrumentals. Favorite track: Hot Seat.
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  • Cassette + Digital Album

    LIT on LIT #3 on music grade cassette. transparent yellow tape. listen to it the way it was meant to be heard. 25 copies available

    Includes unlimited streaming of LIT on LIT #3 via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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1.
Feet What are you waiting for—I am waiting for my [master]—What will you do when your [master] arrives—When my [maser] arrives, I will bow at his feet—What will happen next—I don't know. My [master] is mysterious—When your [master] comes can I bow, too—I don't know. It might be too late— Too late for what— Too late to bow to my [master]— [Boats] Let's have [sex]—I don't know. It's not worth the hassle—But what about love? Don't you want love—I don't know. It's not worth the hassle—Then what should we do? Let's build [boats]—Build [boats]—Yes, [boats]— Then what—Then we can use them to not have [sex]—OK. But what about love? What will happen to our love—We can use it to make more [boats]—
2.
skyline straight out of the 80's hypodermic needles in the toilet spent all night dancing next to people a guy riding a white stallion hipsters calling each other hipster waiting for food laughing at cops
3.
"oh, the horror of our totem ugly and neanderthal! callouses coat a southern drawl freeze my floor and watch it thaw casually, i crawl underneath your wall... i find resolve in cement"
4.
In my dreams Oakland looks like a graffitied slip and slide large industries grow from the ground, massive machines plow over piles of bones and cum. A Girl I know rides a surfboard on a wave of seminal fluid. Next thing you know, John Dozier and I are holding up a taco truck with nerf guns adapted to fire razors laced with PCP and KEtamine We dont want the tacos bro we want to see you give us the tacos bro- John says. The attendent is a mutant squid with a bulbous exposed brain. Dont touch my brain!!!! He freaks out small ticks crawl over his brain sucking down his intelligence. Why sir we have purchased these tacos. huh WE have tacos we have tacos we have tacos we have tacos and nerf guns. We have calimari we have calimari! I’m a vegetarian so menthol infused cuninlingus it is. The machines run over an entire tour group of handicapped pigeons. Dead pigeons get stuck in my teeth. They are mostly made out of worms at this point. I hate flossing because my teeth dont exist.
5.
the working fluid in most people went back to sleep. powr is the abhuman who is the best thing hookah smoking all liposuction, bubble butt implants and nefarious riddles chopping all meditation and DMT huffing on lunch break, in the Muslim prayer room clubbing it’s taking your protest to the cities where squatter camps appear in front heavy dubbing powr is the Vatican person who takes the soup in the occult with naked peas that night and burnt broad beans giving insult swallowing the central stairwell made of sharp edges all still sorrow tried and provocative why another political way snoozes dancing twostep erect in pride vices raising clean if you fail with granted eyes all radiant myself in these todays running in a perpetual lease town that seems small like Pompeii powr is running for office along the path to the genocidal project that marble monument with deerhounds gasping from policy house dissect while the working fluid in most people goes back to sleep you have to compensate me for serving others on the junk heap for what remains of my survival to myself was escape on emergency horns beep beep a habitable planet is created every day, then pine needles back to the life wise was evident when gagged and swallowed the butter knife
6.
I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl It’s no wonder on my belly in clothing inside police cars roll their lights on they don’t see but I must say my old house a book in bed I’m always tired It’s night & cold I have to bury her past but continue even after shining I can only assume 1994 is a simpler I crawl up next to my mother reads I want to knock I need to tell her with all these tract houses— the undeveloped field now a black garbage bag in plot D down the treeless parkway me in my freshman sundress the significance of my presence time—not everyone is suspect & look through a lit window on the glass, there’s something It wasn’t phenomenal, she followed the phone poles up & up she just kept walking til it wasn’t so choke and violet to weird her the farmhouse didn’t have a phone her father said he’d leave a light on but he left 2 the 2nd was dim from the loft of the barn at night the road was something softer she couldn’t stop following it tho the church’s cross stood up like the mast of a ship half-sunk in the side of a hill tho someone hunkered downwind a few yards off the road said there are a thousand green lights up there if you can stand the bramble if you can stand that fog it’ll bite you like a kerchief full of ether when the phone rings
7.
8.
i like to think of the shape i take up in your mind, if maybe my fingers are longer or my voice is more like syrup and less like concrete and if maybe i speak only in whispers. i would like to speak only in whispers so everything i say is your secret to keep or forget. i am yours to keep or forget and i am small enough to fit anywhere you want in your brain or in your shower or in that moment you wake up and mumble and go back to sleep. you think about me thinking about you at stoplights. i think about you thinking about me until i feel dizzy, but a very nice dizzy like i am a wave that is just getting used to being a wave. you fall asleep so easily as if the world isnt horrifying. you fall asleep into me like we’re both snow.
9.
10.
Supine there – can you see it? – a discrepancy in the landscape, vaguely framed by the impasses posed along the descent, revealed now from a new angle, nearer and still wider and, in a moment, only a pale orange drawn between the trees. Dully imparting its light beneath the shadows of evening scud. A beacon of beaded color casting itself across the sinuous teeth of the carved land. It’s here, waning – painting the tracts of deadfall. And there, – reflected in the frigid incontinence of rockface. The road levels to woodlands well above. The likelihood of the light is lessening. Abducted from the air loosening from the effluvium. Hardening in the lungs of men, quietly castigated in their cabins whose chimneys burnish our hidden acres with nebulous smoke. Men the shade of an old bruise, darkening the fringes of an Eastern Tennessee wound.
11.
The News anchor says the neo humans Are falling like fucking flies in a chlorine gas attack. Focusing crystals infused with radioactive meth hit the street. There is a periwinkle girl picking scabs at the groundswell collective. The Mayan apocalypse came and went. Bukowski's boredom manifested in the streets. Till the last beautiful thing I saw was amputee porn, pink nubs erasing phantom genders. Till I couldn't avoid the ultra-violent hilarity of bumper cars. Till I watched gutter suicides on Prime Time. Till I giggled at Bela Lugosi's specter of morphine. Till I resin hit heroin from a human spine. Till I became a ghost haunting dive bars for change. Till I smiled at razor commercials. Till I tried to unionize ants. Till my stories ended with vampires eating Ice cream. Till I watched machinations of Death Culture starve. Till I was a human too. The scuttled Sector 9's were re-vamped, kids bombed the boulevards not looking for lanterns, wind passing Like weed eaters over grass. Quetzalcoatl came and went subverted entertainment and threw some research chems in for kicks because Every anarchist loves to bowl down mummified alleys knocking pins into Abysmal shadows.
12.
you are, to me, not unlike a simile conveying a symbiotic, or perhaps symbolic, non-differentiable relationship between you and yourself, akin to that of a door and its frame, but as if the construction of the two occurred spontaneously, and the hinges, knob, and lock, much like the various lubricants between the web-like interlacings of flesh, and neurotransmitters interspersed in an ever-growing braid of desperately attempted time constriction, were somehow a blatant reflection of the willful, trap-like conflict of me, not knowing how, but, with demure acceptance of the reality of what currently passes as ‘real’ and awareness of the semiotic incomparability of an instance of one person longing to understand another, like the absurd image of, say, two doors attempting, independently, to enter or exit the other, wanting, whether on the inside or outside of the structured, discernible statement of you, to possess some key, some simple device by which to transect the impassible, but functional-seeming portal you, seeming like me, undoubtedly are, in order to... like... somehow... you know, empathize with your concern... or whatever may be similar... to that sentiment
13.
YOU ARE MY NEW GOD I know this because I so want to dance in yr chorus. Want to whisper shit so sweet in yr ear, the center of 1989 will rot and fall out, and through that hole an eleven-year-old me will see her True Name on the nape of yr neck and know how to break-dance. My deer, I think I’ve been learning this sidestroke all my life to slam-dunk my apple in yr basket and really rock out in this slow lagoon with you, and I want to be so “Girl” for you that I get all “Yeah” with my bubblegum baby-making machine, like I want to mermaid up inside yr Cultural Memory to fight off Tom Hanks and Hasbro. Like, hey boy, I want to fly up inside yr Men’s Grooming Kit and die there so I know how it feels to be yr thing: scented and clipped with safety scissors and get so lost in yr Man Cave I need you to invent a new legend for the map made of footprints that teach me to foxtrot, where I bend over the hot oven in my butter colored frock and make muffins that make make muffins that make banana nut muffins and rename me in a pile of your sweet laundry that is sooo dirty but won’t do itself, dumpling. The Afterlife as a Pile of My Lost Vintage Blazers among which we must eternally rifle: the worms inching blind down the wales of the corduroy, my ghost turning out all the pockets. She must piece this together. This project the worms must undo, pressing their wet mouths into elbow patches, undermining the plaid and mothing the wool. My ghost tries to try on the jackets. The shoulders don’t fit because she has no shoulders. Is this is the hell of being immaterial on a mountain of material? In life I mourned the loss of my blazers, left on the backs of chairs, the backs of taxis. In the afterlife they fall right through me. Sometimes little things fall out: knotted cherry-stems, cough drop wrappers, eighty-three cents, a gas receipt, and once, a matchbook with something scribbled inside: “Karyna, you wasted so much of my time. Burn this.”
14.
I watch Mary sleeping on the couch. I can’t take my eyes off her for a single second. I go blank, and then watch her all weird, and then go blank. I don’t know why. I become conscious of a vacuum cleaner in my right hand. “I feel like if you put your mouth on her big toe, you could excuse it as an accident if she wakes up.” I look at the vacuum cleaner. “I don’t think that would be ideal.” “Maybe if you put it over the toe, but didn’t touch it.” Outside it is sunny, a real sunny day. I look at Mary and think about what it’d be like to hit her on the head with a feather pillow but I go blank. I am listening to I don’t know what, the outside world, all these birds. All around me in that room, nothing seems to happen. I move towards her. I try really hard not to wake her up as I move. I don’t know how but my foot moves just the right amount. Mary is sleeping. I feel like it is really hard to take time and cut it into little pieces but I want so badly to cut it and really cut it open flush. I move a table a few inches to the center of the room. I move the floor lamp away from the couch too. I want to empty the room. My aim is to put everything aside, to have a moment with Mary without all the stuff cluttering our lives. But I get tired quickly. I sit on the day bed across from her, evaluate its capacity to support me, calculate its size in relation to the length of the hall. The vacuum cleaner remains upright and unplugged. The curtains behind Mary hang all the way down to the floor. “What are you doing?” I don’t know how to answer Mary’s question. I feel awkward sitting there. So, I stand. Then I feel awkward standing there. So, I sit. Mary takes up her blanket. She goes to her room. When the door closes, I rotate my shoulder, move my arm in exact increments, very precisely, repeat the exact same movement again and again, and ask myself, “What am I doing?” and almost without noticing it, I go blank.
15.
[Pain] Are you in [pain]— Yes. I'm in [pain]. Are you in [pain]— Yes. I'm in [pain], too. What should we do— Let's build [boats]— You are overreacting to your [pain]—What else should we do— We should wait— For what should we wait—Let's wait for less [pain]—   [Money] I have some [pain]. Do you have [pain]—Yes. I have some [pain], too— What will it take to stop your [pain]— I don't know. Maybe it will take money— How much money will it take—It will take more money—How much more money will it take—More than I have—How much money do you have— I have some money. How much money do you have—I have some money, too—Maybe we can stop your [pain]—What about your [pain]. How will we stop that—I don't know—We need more money—

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artwork by matt takaichi

all rights to words belong to their respective readers

additional audio by nathan keele springer // nicholas lowery, caroline white, scott riley irvine, and janey smith provided their own audio

credits

released August 23, 2013

ben mirov - isaghost.blogspot.com
beach sloth - beachsloth.blogspot.com
nicholas lowery - soundcloud.com/nicholaslowery
clint flippin - facebook.com/clint.flippin
shane jesse christmass - facebook.com/SJXSJC
karyna mcglynn - karynamcglynn.com
ian aleksander adams - ianaleksanderadams.com
jayinee basu - jayineebasu.wordpress.com
caroline white - infinitycrush.bandcamp.com
megan boyle - beethoventhemovie.tumblr.com
scott riley irvine - soundcloud.com/scottirvinez
stephen michael mcdowell - stephenmichaelmcdowell.com
janey smith - facebook.com/janey.smith.92
matt takaichi - flickr.com/people/mtakaichi/

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lit on lit mixed tapes El Cerrito, California

manipulated cassette poetry 4 life

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