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Curtains: Readings from Molotov by Tom Baker

by Extreme Volume Pop

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1.
Curtains 00:51
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It’s a bolt from the theatre for me, as I am alone in the audience, not wanting to glimpse your sagging elephant flesh as the curtain parts. My footfalls land like heavy pebbles on the surface of the moon, and this carpet is like flypaper as I move out the glass doorway, past the screaming woman, and into the fog. Through the wrought-iron gate and glancing up at a window two dark shadows move beyond touch of floor lamp as the men start in their places, and I know that this is for real. I really am a monster, and she really is my victim. Jack the Ripper is born.
2.
Digging for Gold (free) 02:32
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Digging for Gold Digging for gold in the blackest night While all around me, framed in the windows overlooking the courtyard, Murder leaps out the jaws of a hungry lion, To devour dead man sitting, with a knife in the forehead, Hammered against the kitchen tiles. A boy bites down on a rare gold doubloon, Smiling to know the taste of wealth, And factories lean crazily at angles over dripping alleyways As I examine a stain on the map. “It’s here! It’s here!” yells an old man, Leaning crazily on a shovel Over what he believes is a buried treasure ripe for the plucking. But I don’t know, Perhaps we have simply mixed our coordinates, With strange frequencies beamed in over the mental wireless That brought us to this mound of earth to start with. Dying babies howl in the steam whistle of a locomotive, Suffering lost in the pathetic cries and grinding crunch of train track chomp As the night plays out its final shuddering gasps. Doorways lead to nowhere, But not quite to evidence Of a brutality that was exhibited On the body of a victim By a fat woman with a crust of sandwich Chomped in her jaws. And I am alone under street lamps / That are coming down around me in pools of white As bugs circle crazily zigzagging under the bright canopy Of electric wave. And a wind from somewhere plays down the street And I feel a cold chill of purpose And I realize that, despite the treasure under my heels, I am poor and alone. Somewhere, an organ grinds...
3.
I Had Loved Her Unto Death 05:13
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4.
The Classroom 01:48
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The Classroom Pouring libations for the classroom I stop to consider that the project– which is little more than a paint-bynumbers rose torn from a sheaf of coloring books– may not suit the mental aptitude of the assembled students. Wine flows freely from plastic jugs, and I look so smashing in my new suit that I hardly mind being instructed to complete someone else’s project, an obscure coloring dotted with arcane scribbling, and someone complains to me that education, whatever else it is, may not be suitable for a tough kid with a mohawk and “No Future!” poised somewhere to burst forth back of his throat, and I notice that the girl, that eternal girl who transforms herself nightly to suit my longing, is sitting in the back row, and I go to her, and tell her ‘I love you, and I always will love you,” but she merely smiles and her teeth look like jagged chips of rock. “I know,” she says. “But–”
5.
The Hand 02:11
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The Hand A gnarled hand of stone reaches up out of the field, grasping the clear blue sky above the roof of the old place. Someone has parked a building, from a city long ago, across the way from the neighbors; twin ghosts peer out of dusty windows. 1902 suits and ties that look like nooses as black men wave from tenement rooftops to white boys in the fields below. “Holler back if you can hear us!” This dirty building, dusty, dank–covered in soot and years– does not belong here, but time has doubled over into a knot. Who are these daguerreotype faces, who these dusky smiles, that make decades vanish with flutter of waving fingers? The boys do not know the answer to this but outside in back of the house an airplane star bolt shoots in heavenly splendor. “Can’t you hear it buzz?” asks one but the light betrays the origin from many galaxies away, as neighbor kids chase airborne red disc down. (hopscotch sidewalk) A solid rectangle of infrared shoots down the neighborhood, feeling faces that are being scanned to learn the measure of time. And no wonder the past vomits up a present for the future…
6.
Vile 00:29
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Vile Sucking the vile stick You sit on the pot While Nine Inch Nails Hammers away in the background. I am naked As is he Who, alone, can make the disgust I feel for you Seem so palpably real.
7.
This is Only a Test 04:41
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--this is only a test- Cackling like witches at a Sabbath, Dancing in the blue fire of ferocious Luminosity, Working strange magic with heavenly vulva pressed against the dim, choked mouth of Father Sky– I know that I can touch you, in deep grooves of old oil As the dry cracked surface parts for the feeling grip of my brain to scan the picture of an old fighter grown victorious in the ringside seat of dreams– And this is only a test. (What jungle drums pound heathen muzak for the immortal soul Of this esbat? None, and I reckon that pictures are all I have…)
8.
The Rooster 02:42
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The Rooster I hold your face in the crook formed by the intersecting planes of my two palms-It must be a cinematic angle, a shot for a feature film wherein the candid camera is hidden. Yet, everything, every shot and angle, seems choreographed to the point of obsessive perfection. And Auntie tell me, she say the "Universe is the vast cosmic egg, wherein God hath wrought the ins and outs of creation. And we are a part and parcel of that Cosmic Egg." But verily I say unto her, "We don't live on the inside of that egg, and God lives on the outside surface of the shell. Perhaps it is the next..." Wherein... Planetary systems are hatched by a great- "Rooster of the Heavenly Spheres!" But this is all another simple folktale, (...and so I must cast it aside as intellectual refuse.) We pop the shell, beyond, then look back through the crack in the opening exposing a vast whirling universe spinning concentrially toward some fulcrum spot, some white hot point building to a really truly evil climax... When I was a kid you gave me slick, cumsplattered fuck mags to jerk-off to. This was my introduction to sex and the Eternal Mystery. I was the fertilizing agent of your perverse pleasure. Now, thirty years and a belly full of revenge later, I want to impregnate the slit in your soul. To fill your putrid vulva with the white hot lava of my hate And teach you about death, and God, and the Cosmic Egg, And other things I know you'll never understand.
9.
The Letter 03:40
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The Letter Sunrise is a foul bitch Wiping the dreams from my mind Like dusting cobwebs at dawn. I expected more from a night’s wanderings Than you in the hospital And me sending a gourd in an envelope. Did the fragile seeds remind you that there really is a God? Did I tell you as a boy about the rules concerning smoking? How things change in the dim vista of years As the struggle continues Unabated? Perhaps your condition isn’t terminal, And perhaps your need for truth outweighs my clinging to falsehood. No matter, you returned my message with scotch tape and derision Stamped on the outside of an envelope that could contain the world. What was I trying to say? That hope is a mirthless, tired whore shaking herself awake at dawn? That we all need a dream to cling to as the bitter acid of minutes erases boyhood charm from our sagging features? I’m feeling old today, and the creaking furniture of bygone sunsets isn’t being sold in my personal store of memories and delusions. In fact, I’m feeling used today, like fate that motherfucker has turned me out onto a street lined with sad faces and tired eyes. (How much will you pay for me to comfort you? I could write missives from now until Judgment. Would you listen, ensconced as it were, in your comfortable stiff bed and starched white shroud?) Decadence suits you, even in the enfolding arms of your ultimate demise. And death of this dream is permanent delusion. I’ll take the letter back. I’ll eat my own damn fruit. I’ll shove it down my throat until I choke, and then laugh as I vomit up bits and pieces of guilt. I’m not your own to tamper with, nor can use be made of a carcass so willing to spoil itself on the bright white sands of burning enmity. This confession has meant nothing. Tomorrow night you’ll be well, and I’ll be sick.
10.
Joe's Porcelain 03:36
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Joe's Porcelain The house was huge-- and a cavernous old thing of hollow drips and black time. The tick-tick of dusty years echoed miserably across the uneven floorboards. Outside, the weather cock spins a Vitus dance in the churning maelstrom of fury, the trees roaring leaf against stem as the moon illuminates patches of dark against bone white truth. Inside, I've got a log in each hand and I'm cowering against the shadow, while Joseph comes in, his mouth working like a fish, and he's begging me not to crack the porcelain doll that lay with infuriating passivity beneath me in the bug-infested gloom. Please he says. I've worked so much he says. It's not that bad he says. She'll never know he says. But outside a peal of thunder and a flash of lightning lend a specter of the macabre to our surroundngs, as this dream-like moment in time --flash-freezes-- in the subconscious flicker of my yesterdays and tomorrows Too late. All gone. The compassion is spent. I bring the logs in my arms down, careening with a whoosh through the dead air toward the dying eyes the button eyes The black and miserable empty shoeshine sockets that already know truth because they already know pain... DO YOU HEAR THAT? They already KNOW TRUTH, because they already KNOW PAIN. He's fucked her a thousand times, of course. Stolen the soul right out and away, to keep, wadded up like a cache of fruit flies captured in the center of his palm, to giggle over. Please he says. It's okay he says. She likes it he says. It's her time he says. So I crush the glass cranium, and proceed to devestate the room. Somewhere, in a corner, blinded by the white hot blood red bullet of rage seeping down from one corner of my eye, he cowers in a hole. He's preparing himself for me. For me. And I'll have him I say. But not. Just. Yet.
11.
Digging For 02:24
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Digging For Flipping through the songbook, singing the same dire tunes, over and over again. I see your gun drawn under shadow of grizzled face, whiskey breath, sitting on the piano you might even resemble Old Stagger Lee. Speak to me in dreams and visions, but don’t raise your voice; my nerves can’t handle it. I feel a little shaken. Could you shoot straight as a note of music, played badly, on a recording running in reverse? Is the music of our lives a cacophonous blending of bone crunch notes blasted into the firmament of sunrise? I can’t dream you Colonel, as soft as a Kentucky downpour, warning the black man about a plot to murder his children. Somewhere, in the siren wail of a passing train, loneliness stills the panic as I drain the last dregs from my cup. I am looking for an image. (I am seeking a pale treasure, haunted by the realization that slow words ring hollow, as I type out my waxen effigy of little spaces and droll dots.) Couldn’t I form you out of mental clay, and erect an idol that could laugh, and sing, and cry and perplex, and solidify this straggling poem until the image bursts, like dire sunrise, through the cloud covering of my benumbed skull? Where is my image? Where is my music? Haunted hallways beckon nature to creep, like straggling tendrils of time, through the boarded windows of the soul; Time is not a friend to me, I do not walk with it in shadows cast by the yawning mouth of a stone monument called “All Our Days”. Instead here I sit, bleached white as a midnight bone, tucked into the comfort of cold walls where hate dwells and knows me for the coward that I am. The dream will not leave me. I cannot see my image. I do not hear the music. But my fingers work restlessly at the keys because they must. They must. I am digging for something grand. I am hunting treasure in the back brain. I am picking my mental nose. I suppose…
12.
Watch This Mother Burn 02:16
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Watch This Mother Burn “There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea shining in his head frightened people and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.” ― Antonin Artaud I'll watch this mother burn I'll wrap it up around a tattered old flagpole-- Hoist it up the line till it does a little shimmie Like a convict at the end of a rope dancing in the flyblown breeze-- And my, isn't the world hot? What? What? If I dip you in shit and set you out on the tarmac to collect flies In your eyes Do you even realize that you're just being used Another wage slave earning a few crusts while the fatter and fiestier pigs dance the jig? and they call it luxuriating in the New Economy that doesn't include you because, quite frankly, you're just the shit magnet And there're flies to collect So if they kill some babies or bomb a village or turn back the clock to 1863 or make pretend they are holy holy holy eloi lama sabacthani do I care a whit or damn? No. I'll watch this mother burn, pornography and all. I'll watch this mother burn, its bibles and shopping centers and cheap diversions --and cooking shows and reality tv and cyberaugmented fictions of a bourgeois past that never really existed beyond reruns of the old and sterile and false. My blood bleeds petrol my fingers pop sparks, And this is all just poetic rumination, so you can turn down your red flags and knock off the sirens. I'm as gentle as a kitchen. Or a kitten. Or a cat. With nine lives. Yet still, I tell you, one sunny day--- I'LL WATCH THIS MOTHER BURN.
13.
This Fist and What It Can Claim 01:20
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The Psychopath I’ll trap you in the silent cathedral, a place of dour amusements, with pick and rope and bone saw handy to take your little ego to pieces part by puzzled part, with drill bit hammered through splintering door into the dancing figure of the unwilling hostess who jibbers in the darkness at the injustice of it all. This love is a madness born within, the sickness they say I can never shake, and with hands in grubby pockets I peer beneath beard to see the game being played by Sacred Mother in the dust. And this place they’ve set apart for us, beyond reach of newspaper jackal and tired blue-suit eye is perfect in the way that a thigh bone crushed By the speculation of a weight imposed is perfect in the way it pops. I cower in the darkness, crouched above booby trap, swinging the noose, waiting for that first rustle of feet through door to know your tired gaze and slack mouth of regret. You can write all the missives you want to the pecking vultures of public opinion, parade with placard in the streets and denounce the demons that damn you until judgment or sunrise whichever comes first, but this darkness is mine and eternal, and in here I am breathing and waiting and the only power in the world is this fist and what it can claim.
14.
Boat 00:27
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This boat is a part of me, An extension of who I am; And maybe you can’t see that the boards are my bones, The waves are my blood, The rudder is my brain, And the destination is a few nautical miles, From the center of my soul.
15.
Fear Writ Large 02:46
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All I know is wretched fear, My old friend shooting from the chest, Like a piffling ache that wants to be born Into pain. Sleep disturbed by nothing, Dreams sacrosanct prisms of fantasy, Yet I cannot control the brainwash images, The sad illusions, Of my slumbering hours. And I know the taste of FEAR. Writ large in icy letters that drip anticipated blood. Did you leave me in the forest of that longing domicile, (Surrounded on all sides by the cemetery walk, The séance parlor, The dead cards held aloft in trembling hands) As the pale and silent throng wing out into an infinity That will disappear with the sunrise wide open gaze of my Rheumy eyes? Sing a canticle for me, Delight in my poison, I am bereft and still and alone in the room, Where the spirits speak to old friends in muted tongues, And I breathe in the stale air, To know that Father waits for you, as like as not a dead hand, Holding down the tarot of our lives, As each body blinks out into the mists of merciless time. And what I know is FEAR, And how I feel the regret wash over me, And take me, And poison me, And distort my sleeping fancies until light and life seem Filtered through the branches Of a brooding tree. (And it is there my body hangs.) Goals I have goals, What next? Will I ever know What it is like to live like the rich man? Or am I forever condemned to be a shiftless mouse, Pecking at the rancid cheese Of a pretended life? Will I ever swoon like Romeo Before the awesome visage Of some svelte Juliette, As I try and reconcile My past failures with my future ones? Will I groan to know the weight of Silver treasures and golden fragments glistening, Like pyrite embers in front of my Gluttonous eyes? Does this longing charm you? Are you a snake? Do you twist in a basket? Am I a flute? (I demand sanity trials and a hung jury…)
16.
Auntie's Beach 06:46
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Auntie’s Beach The beach was a long, snake-like strip of sand leading up to two sandcastle thrones perched atop a little pyramid of jagged rock. The tide was coming in. –But this is not the sea, Auntie, He say. He is bent over in the surf. She is bent over as well. Beside them, a dripping wet notebook of scrawled chicken-scratches plays lazily in the gentle tide. The pages are still barely readable, if he could make out her handwriting. Sand is sticking on the pages She is bent over, hunched, in a miserable position. Defeated, like a depressed monkey. –I once saw a monkey eat a piece of rotten fruit to get drunk, he say. He say this as if it is the most fascinating fact in all the world. I think he saw it on National Geographic. She looks at him miserably. –You probably just dreamed that, she says. She is still squatting in the sand and foam. –No. But I’ll tell you what I did dream last night. She looks at him with those miserable, bleary red eyes. Her hair is a limp, wet, frazzled mess. She says, –And what did you dream last night, Null? She says this as if she couldn’t care less. He spy the mysterious, spiral bound notebook a few feet away, where it is gradually becoming more and more soggy and ruined by the salt sea. The steady churning slop of the incoming tide lulls me into a semi-trance. –Last night I impersonated Hitler. She stares blankly, uncomprehending. –Of course, I had on a stiff grey Nazi jacket with a swastika armband, and I had a cartoon approximation of Hitler’s face and famous limp forelock. The dream began in the middle of events, I think. –I was delivering a speech when, suddenly, an assassin stands up in the crowd, points a Walther P.38 at me, and fires…or maybe it was a row of assassins. I can’t remember. At any rate, I can still see the determined, square-jawed visage of the lead assassin, his hair combed over into his eyes. I tell you: it could have been a young Hitler. –But I was hit. But not killed. Next I know, I am recuperating in a schoolroom restroom, a big place. But the stall I’m stuck in doesn’t seem to have a door. So here I am, sitting with my pants down around my ankles, and I’m sure I’ve shit myself from being shot, and I’m bleeding still, minimally. –And this row of horrid teenage girls comes rushing in in a line, and right away I make they are trying not to look at my bloody, shitty nakedness, and they are retrieving book bags or packs from a big pile in a corner of the lavatory. I am still dressed as Hitler, and the whole situation just seemed monstrous. –So I must have beat a retreat from a lavatory to a dormitory room. I am talking to two Jewish boys about Hell. I seem as if I don’t believe in Hell. I ask, So where is this Hell you speak of? –One of the boys seems shy and withdrawn. The other is a chubby fellow in a white T-shirt and a sock cap. He has a dark complexion and wide, laughing eyes. –I ask him if only Jews go to heaven. –He affirms this for me. –So I stumble out, shot. I’m still dressed as Hitler apparently, still bleeding, although why I haven’t bled to death yet I its own private mystery. –So this monster truck that looks like a UPS truck crossed with a house on wheels comes pulling up. My mother is behind the wheel. She looks a lot younger. Hitler’s mother was young when she died. And inside it is huge, and gunmetal grey floors. Looks like a giant storehouse. –And I tell her all about being Hitler. Got me shot. I’m bleeding all over these floors. *** He looks up from his reverie. Up the beach, he can see his grandparents seated imperiously on thrones made like sandcastles. They are either asleep, petrified into suspended animation, or dead. But their expressions seem frozen in time. He looks back at his aunt. She is still crouched in the surf. Beyond, he can see the sun darken behind little grey and white veil of cloud, revealing its face only momentarily to paint with bright yellow illumination the seashore world. Below, that damnable soggy notebook clotted with sand, soaked through until the scrawled loops of ink were blotted into nonsense, (–-It had something to do with a bundle of sticks.) He didn’t know what she was talking about; she looked as if she was recovering from some sort of mental fugue state. Or maybe just coming down off of really good drugs. She ran her fingers through her stringy, dirty bangs. Overhead, lonely gulls cast shadows on the ground below. *** Later he walked up the beach, Kicking driftwood as he went. His sneakers were clotted with sand; his nose was stinging with the rasp of sea salt. He had sweated a bit, but felt surprisingly cool as the gentle breeze wafted in off the water. Ahead, he saw the strange, statuesque figures of his maybe dead grandparents seated in their sandcastle thrones. –It’s a lesson of some sort. Something about time? He wasn’t sure. Seagulls cawed; the tide rumbled less and less gently. Sandcastles eroded in the salty air. It was all a moment.
17.
Exit No Exit 03:07
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A selection of readings from "Molotov" by Tom Baker. Backed by experimental music compositions, these literary forays into the vast, limitless black of the author's mind will show you a place at once dark, yet, invested with the deep significance of our most revelatory night time visions and dreams. Surreal, poignant, and burbling with the angry bile of a self-confessed outsider, Molotov is a unique collection both unsettling and surreal.

Purchase "Molotov: Poems" by Tom Baker.

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released November 9, 2019

Words, narration and sound and music production by Tom B.

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Extreme Volume Pop Indiana

Hopefully, my various musics are ultimately like magic bullets that enter and impact at the base of the skull, ricochet around the brain chamber, and then leave a gaping exit wound in the forehead. You may hate them


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