but minor chords and towering fifths
like enormous crystal sculptures
in far-flung fields

where the wind blows
and the rain turns to ice
and the traveler squints

but continues on
the solos meanwhile on the new blind guardian album
are cleaner than ferraris

yes
the singer still sounds like he's afraid of a monster
and yes

his subject matter still comes
from science fiction and fantasy books
and there's a dragon on the album cover

and then what's more get this
this dragon, flanked by two dudes with axes,
is emerging from a fucking pyramid

you've seen that bumper sticker,
"real men worship jesus"
go ahead

keep telling
yourself
that

along with esplanade
which remains among the most beautiful things I've ever seen

phantasmagoria
brings half a dozen different things into the frame

and lets them sort of collide
except collisions break things

whereas what happens here
is an absolute harmony

in which the old yeats question
becomes totally incomprehensible

it's tremendous
but esplanade

man
I'm pretty sure that's one of the greatest things ever attempted by anyone

I've seen it twice now
and I like vivaldi & all

but I think you could perform this piece
without any music at all

and I'd still end up in the same condition
awed

wrecked
shouting with joy

I knew but didn't know
a guy who shot himself last summer

I feel like somewhere in esplanade
is the truth that would liberate the suicides

we all grow up
and endure partings that separate us from more things than one

our younger selves
our sense of play

the spectre of some internal divorce
from the self that makes us who we are

looms
and threatens to capture us in spreading shadow

we can't let that happen
we have to feel everything as deeply as we can

let it run through us
and then having taken in

as much as we can
leap into the air

with our friends by our sides
and if not with friends

then with the audience before us
knowing they're there

whether we can see them or not
in the often

blinding
glare of the footlights

suspended there in the final iteration of all seeing
like the cover
of some trippy science fiction
paperback

and since I am feeling emboldened to describe things
seen by few and remembered by fewer
let me further speculate that there is a record player inside the building
and speakers in the windows on the second floor

the speakers point out toward the small field
whose terminus is the void;
the turntable to which they are connected
plays a ride for revenge album

the album is called wisdom of the few
its sleeve is on hi-gloss stock
and it's an awesome record
no matter what anybody tells you

if you listen to it now as many times as you can
then when you arrive at that final floating island
it will feel very familiar to you.
on the other hand

if you wait
then you'll be really surprised
the choice is yours,
as mr. case, my algebra teacher, used to say

but the prairie if asked:
"where was your origin?"
wouldn't answer, not because it has no mouth to speak of or with

but because neither it nor any of us on it
have any idea
the question resembles "what is zero minus zero"

some places when you're there
make a point of quietly and effortlessly erasing
all that preceded them

when we emerge from these places
we find that they have congealed around a point
somewhere in our thoughts

and the point resembles a stone
with rippling or mottled colors
running from surface to core

do you want to know something
I think Destroyer's Trouble in Dreams
was an underrated record

if only you believe in miracles,
so would I
even as a spirit in the trees you 1) can't get your tenses straight and
2) have a super pretty voice

but here is the thing about marty balin in the trees
and the children who shrug off his little ghost game:
they all listen to the same new record when they go to sleep tonight
on the floor of the forest

that record is by jacob newman and it is called reflections and diffusions,
available on the earth mantra label which gives its records away for free
about that title by the way
one day

I will hire some death metal guys
to write titles for the albums of the new age guys
to stop the new age guys
from using words like "reflections"

and then we will all walk through the dark woods
meditating on what we've learned
cut it out marty
we know it's you

i gave myself a present.
i flew to tennessee to see amy grant
who was touring the twentieth anniversary
of her album lead me on, which was special to me.

i have been meaning to write an article about the whole experience
for some time now
maybe pitch it to some of those magazines
that run personal-narrative articles

you know the kind of article i'm talking about
they begin in medias personal res
and then gently flesh out a few details
and toward they end they circle some greater truth

like a dog who's worried there's a trap somewhere near the food dish.
i wrote the intro to the article and tucked it away.
it was going to take a long time to process
how i'd felt seeing those songs played by the band that recorded them,

or most of that band. today i learned that will owsley,
who played on that record, is dead by his own hand.
mourn for his family, mourn for his friends,
mourn for the darkness so deep that a man can see no way out.

will owsley, you are gone and can't hear my voice.
i bear testimony that your music, while you were here,
made an enormous difference to lots of people.
i was one of them and i'll remember you.

who among us has not stood near the abyss that claimed you,
and heard in its roar some ghost of a liar's promise,
and wondered how hard it it would be to find out, at last?
let those few of us count themselves blessed indeed.

then the way to do it
is in the way one hears
on the new album
by noted Krishnacore act 108

with passion that seems to actually spring
from somewhere
screaming like you feel a need to scream
not like it's a formal constaint

if you're going to sing
in that screaming style
which is now so common
that it almost never sounds angry

or desperate
or rebellious
or sincere
or interesting

or anything but profoundly conformist, really
then do it like that guy from 108
if you're going to do the scream-sing thing
repeat: if you are

did I say that once already

for a long time at any rate
I have been quietly threatening myself with it
the prospect of writing poems I mean
instead of paragraphs
since most of my paragraphs at present I save
for a longer story I'm telling
with which I am taking
my sweet time

a few years ago I started working on a few poems
about a few favorite bands
and the more I revised these poems
the more I saw that most of the interesting things I had to say about the music I loved
was tending naturally toward
the accursed form of free verse

god damn you walt whitman
I hope your total victory makes you happy
out there in the cold depths of space, whose country
is bannerless

today anyhow we make it official
the last plane to jakarta
only carries poems now

see the passengers tape them text-outward to the windows
see the pilot lighting his poems on fire
see the poems trapped in a plane above the pacific
which will never run out of fuel & never land

that's where we're at now

when next you see us

we'll be getting into this here album by a band called "flourishing"

whose name
makes a person say
yeah or i can dig that
several times
in softening
tones.

I guess the question to which Last Plane to Jakarta has been arriving is this: what is an artifact? The question sort of preemptively assumes that we want artifacts. To be clear: we do. We think artifacts aren't necessarily physical-world things, but that physical-world things are still the most convenient way of asserting that there's an artifact somewhere. Above all, we're more convinced than ever that good music is the substance of: its content, its image (I'd prefer "spectre," but sometimes you just have to give yourself a break), and the things people remember collectively about these two: and importantly, the struggle that takes place -- that always takes place -- in reconciling these. The movements of various principals for control. Nowhere clearer, at present, than in this remarkable document, the revealing of which won't make these two opaque & unhelpful paragraphs any clearer to hardly anybody. Still, though. Poetry is what you find when you arrive at the end of prose*, and this double-CD, whose 2nd half I haven't even gotten to yet, is poetry plain & simple, which is to say, neither plain, nor simple. The chances that you'll like it are extremely slight, but there's going to be somebody out there who hears, in the songs on Silent Knight's first disc when considered with its liner notes and accompanying photographs, the sound of wind rushing madly through a vortex. That vortex is history, and the sound made by the wind is the stuff of dreams.

*nb: at either end

I HAVE BEEN STOKED FOR THIS RECORD SINCE SPRING

LISTENING NOW

OH HELL YES THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT

STRAIGHT TO THE YEAR-END LIST WITH YOU MY FRIEND, ERIN MCKEOWN IS THE REAL DAMN DEAL

BEST FROM FRANCE

JD