Missing Jim

Some of the most important, fascinating and lovely live performances I've ever seen were by Jim Carroll, and they were readings. Every now and then his silence gets stuck in my teeth and I have to google him to make sure I didn't miss something very tragic - like the end of his life.

In the mid- to late-90s, I attended his readings year after year. I miss him so much. He was "working on a novel" back then, and his site is still saying the same thing ten years later. Not that it shouldn't take ten years to write a book...

His last reading was...well, I started getting worried then. He looked so thin, like he might just disappear. I think this is why I'm afraid he'll just disappear and no one will know.

He'd be the only master capable of it. Even though that's what Andy Warhol wanted, he kept himself too much in the spotlight. About death, Andy once said "I'd rather disappear than die...I'd like to come back as a ring on Elizabeth Taylor's finger." But I digress.

One of the first times I attended a reading, Jim presented 8 Fragments for Kurt Cobain. Someone stole my cd of him reading it...I guess that proves how long ago I last saw him and how long ago he produced and published any poetry. I found this downloadable mp3 of him reading; look at 36 minutes, 49 seconds for the Cobain poem.

8 Fragments for Kurt Cobain
1/
Genius is not a generous thing
In return it charges more interest than any amount of royalties can cover
And it resents fame
With bitter vengeance

Pills and powders only placate it awhile
Then it puts you in a place where the planet's poles reverse
Where the currents of electricity shift

Your Body becomes a magnet and pulls to it despair and rotten teeth,
Cheese whiz and guns

Whose triggers are shaped tenderly into a false lust
In timeless illusion

2/
The guitar claws kept tightening, I guess on your heart stem.
The loops of feedback and distortion, threaded right thru
Lucifer's wisdom teeth, and never stopped their reverberating
In your mind

And from the stage
All the faces out front seemed so hungry
With an unbearably wholesome misunderstanding

From where they sat, you seemed so far up there
High and live and diving

And instead you were swamp crawling
Down, deeper
Until you tasted the Earth's own blood
And chatted with the Buzzing-eyed insects that heroin breeds

3/
You should have talked more with the monkey
He's always willing to negotiate
I'm still paying him off...
The greater the money and fame
The slower the Pendulum of fortune swings

Your will could have sped it up...
But you left that in a plane
Because it wouldn't pass customs and immigration

4/
Here's synchronicity for you:

Your music's tape was inside my walkman
When my best friend from summer camp
Called with the news about you

I listened then...
It was all there!
Your music kept cutting deeper and deeper valleys of sound
Less and less light
Until you hit solid rock

The drill bit broke
and the valley became
A thin crevice, impassible in time,
As time itself stopped.

And the walls became cages of brilliant notes
Pressing in...
Pressure
That's how diamonds are made
And that's WHERE it sometimes all collapses
Down in on you

5/
Then I translated your muttered lyrics
And the phrases were curious:
Like "incognito libido"
And "Chalk Skin Bending"

The words kept getting smaller and smaller
Until
Separated from their music
Each letter spilled out into a cartridge
Which fit only in the barrel of a gun

6/
And you shoved the barrel in as far as possible
Because that's where the pain came from
That's where the demons were digging

The world outside was blank
It's every cause was just a continuation
Of another unsolved effect

7/
But Kurt...
Didn't the thought that you would never write another song
Another feverish line or riff
make you think twice?
That's what I don't understand,
because it's kept me alive, above any wounds

8/
If only you hadn't swallowed yourself into a coma in Roma...
You could have gone to Florence
And looked into the eyes of Bellini or Raphael's Portraits

Perhaps inside them
You could have found a threshold back to beauty's arms
Where it all began...

No matter that you felt betrayed by her

That is always the cost
As Frank said,
Of a young artist's remorseless passion

Which starts out as a kiss
And follows like a curse