What can be said of the children of this age?
they are are like a society of explorers and archaeologists
who became convinced of the dearth of truth in their own borders.

they collected maps and atlases, weathered and worn,
laid them on their walls as tapestries,
assembled in small, wide-eyed groups to decipher and connect
drew to their chests compasses and electronics,
knelt at their shrines of computers and books,
became convinced of a harvest of history and rubies,
emeralds and wisdom in a land not their own.

they sold their possessions, their homes, their birthrights,
wrote their wills, swept together savings bonds, retirement plans,
trust funds to finance a journey to this place, this fresh frontier.

they cross-examined and cross-referenced their charts, their legends
with stars and satellites over ocean and into mountains
far from their homes, arrived at the site foretold by their plans,

and immediately set about to unearthing it in a storm of shovels and machinery,
only to uncover a vast, intricate emptiness,
a pattern of resonant tunnels and blankly majestic caverns, a nothing, a failure.

They quickly left, abandoning their lattice of equipment and cordons,
and returned to their own country, taking refuge with what remained
of their friends and relatives.

Of their trip, they stuck to the lie they had told themselves on the journey back,
which told nothing of the echoing caves, that they couldn’t follow their maps,
that lost and running out of food, they had been forced to abandon their search.

They vowed loudly to return, quietly pawned their guides and maps,
nursed their humiliation with bravado, let a disquiet seep into their palms,
the caves themselves roaring and thundering in their eyes.

Here at (t)wn, we often bring you things worth noting for their attempt at substantive beauty, truth, or some combination of both. But we did not start out that way, necessarily. Although it’s very poetry heavy now, when we started out, we just intended to have a group blog about anything in particular. Asides, observations, witticisms, lists, etc. So this blog post is in some ways a return to some of the neglected spiritual roots of this blog.

Today, someone over at invisiblecreature.com (a graphic design firm that specializes in album art) posted a link to the below video on twitter (@icreature), saying “Kinda sad that a YouTube clip could literally ruin a day.” I was expecting something like a video of a puppy being run over, or some kind of Current Event. Instead was this (You may need to go over to youtube to watch it, it’s not being kind to our layout):

You only need to watch about half of the video to get the idea, so if you become nauseous, feel free to stop. You can even stop after the first chorus, if you’d like. I retweeted the video, appending my own comment: “Scrap the human race and start over again.” The inimitable and astute music and culture-critic Joel Hartse remarked that watching the video, he couldn’t figure out what I found so objectionable about it. So I posted the following diatribe on twitter, which I have lightly edited and collated, and forms the body of this post:

“Let’s set aside the winking day-glo aging hipster pastel faux-punk of the video for a sec. (A lot to set aside, I know). But let’s. The backing track on the verses doesn’t even pretend to do anything but vaguely hint at a chord progression, leading to an anemic chorus that tries to substitute orchestra hits(!) for a hook, the autotune slathered on the singer’s voice like so much mayonnaise. Is there a song underneath somewhere? I can’t tell, but I can’t be bothered to even check. There’s no way of appreciating or even approaching this song. It’s a Clarke’s monolith of pop trash nihilism, impenetrable and inscrutable. Oh my god, it’s full of stars!”

Art has changed my luck:
my road does me favors every now and then,
offers billows of smoke, but tempers its wrath.

But I still have no taste for an unseasoned remedy.
3 weeks ago, on a walk into the park,
I came across a bird long dead

stretched on the gridded concrete,
cleanly decaying, no trail of ants
or roil of maggots, purified by the cold.

I knelt there for awhile, I remembered
how my hand looks like how my father’s hand
used to look.

This is the bulbous fruit we are offered
to taste and see.

I will never understand the way
the ground is always thirsty, even as the rain
scrapes across it, carries it away.

Anyone can feel the philosophy
in the contours, in the smoothness
of a hammer’s grip, in its intentions.
Its appetites are no mystery.