Soundtracked

Other Fish

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Yo yo yo!! Look who's back for "Invalid Item" ! I feel bad for a late start; I told Cinn that I've got a little stack of poems I'd like to share, and yet that hasn't stopped me from ordering a few more books from Amazon that I used to own. And today, this poem is from one of them.

The book is Verses That Hurt  ...it's a compilation I first found maybe 15 years ago when I was working a second job as a bookseller at Waldenbooks (RIP). I wasn't too up on "who's who" when it came to poetry back then, but I recognized a few names and bought a copy on sight. Among the many listed were Allen Ginsberg (a legend), Lee Ranaldo (of the band Sonic Youth), and one M. Doughty. Luckily the book has a section at the end with little biographical paragraphs of everyone in the comp, and my suspicions were confirmed: M. Doughty is Mike Doughty, from the (in my head) legendary and short-lived 90's band Soul Coughing. Maybe you've heard of them; maybe not. I got into them as I was moving into my first apartment and "Super Bon Bon" was blowing up on the radio. I remember laying in the tiny, windowless bedroom I shared with my little brother, and waking up one morning, and turning my stereo on in the pitch blacker than black of the room, hearing this for the first time. To say it was dope would be an understatement.

"Super Bon Bon"   -Soul Coughing

"Move aside, and let the man go through."

But since we're here to talk about poetry, let's take a look at one of the M. Doughty offerings in Verses That Hurt...of his six selections, this is one of two that isn't written like a stream of consciousness paragraph.

Other Fish

A girl with a backpack on a cellular phone sighs;
between the exhale and the first consonant
a van barrels through her. And who knows
what the boy thinks, his line slipping from her voice,
her words sucked backwards through the wire?
Two hours from now he’ll be drunk,
his slurred thoughts slobbering over motives,
why she decided suddenly to leave him
and hung up mid-word.

The phone yelps angrily from under a bus,
and she lays splayed like an asterisk
in the dreary sentence of Fourteenth Street.

Man...simple but slightly heartbreaking and graphic. One of the early evils of cell phones maybe, where people are too focused on the convo so they don't notice the world around them? And/or perhaps a poke and a sigh at toxic masculinity, because the poor boy doesn't realize his ladyfriend's been murdered by vehicle, so he does what many men do...get drunk and commiserate over why his girl has left him. Can I tell you something? I love the last three lines. "...splayed like an asterisk" is a fucking immaculate description of someone who's been completely obliterated by a random vehicle. That's a visual that's gonna hang in my head for awhile.

Mike Doughty has since gone solo; performing some Soul Coughing tunes stripped down as well as releasing his own music. I'll leave you with one of my favorites...I think it's about an ordinary girl who you think is the one and maybe she is or she isn't, but you're so jaded on trying to disseminate your new feelings that maybe it's one of the others you're missing out on, and you've forgotten how good it felt to be in love with anyone.

"27 Jennifers"   -Mike Doughty

"You might be the one that I've been seeking for.
You might be the strange delightful."