Resurrection, by swampmessiah

Resurrection

by swampmessiah

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1.	Once Upon a Time...There Was Sadness 06:32	info	buy track
2.	Entertainment 06:07	lyrics	buy track
Not all gods have gender, not all have sex. I see them spread in line, a metaphysical burlesque. Ages ago they shed their skin, that sense of themselves as awakening, and their feeling for us, carrion erupting in their nightmares. Thrown away like a Twinkie wrapper, not even a final savoring, a squirt of creme filling licked out, just an oily crinkling tossed aside— this tyranny of garbage this mortal threat to the gods gutterized, gutterized. Their thoughts are inured to the vortex of flesh— our rapture, our touch, our empire split as impressions collide, coincide, every organ’s joy quickening the spin. They tore off their skin. So many gods have ripped it and grown accustomed to suffering, to bloody stumps, conscience, to a red drip, guilt, sin, regrets oozing into view to evaporate or coagulate. Exposed yet invulnerable, like a public confession, so open, so well-known, yet impeding intimacy. Their apparent feeling is just a groan beneath the scab. And this is our entertainment for tonight, perhaps for eternity, our entertainment, our fun, a chorus line of insensate androgynes, ancient and scabrous, a new crust at every performance, our entertainment for tonight, for eternity. Not all gods have gonads, not all have sex. I see them drawn in line, a metaphysical burlesque. Exposed yet invulnerable, a public confession, so open, so complete, yet circumscribing intimacy. Their apparent feeling is just a scab, a crust protecting the guts. And this is our entertainment for tonight, for eternity, our entertainment, our fun, a chorus line of impassive androgynes, ancient and scabrous, a new shell at each performance, our entertainment for tonight, for eternity, all lined up, their skins forgotten, our carnival forsaken.
3.	Imperfect Poem 07:26	lyrics	buy track
I wouldn’t write a perfect poem. I wouldn’t even write a good one, because the gods, all the deities of vengeance, which are the heart of your limitations, would come to destroy me. Any word that is better than average brings envious wrath. Any image or metaphor, any thought at all that can brighten or illuminate, clarify or distinguish, will come back to me like a volcano’s outpouring— earthquake and explosion as ecstatic warning, poison gas, fire and lava as grand finale— an overreaction to my slight achievement. So, I would strike myself dumb, leave mouth and pen impoverished like the land of my birth, rotten and dull and sodden like an abandoned farm or deadfall of balsam fading into the black humus, decomposing rather than descending into the future. I would make myself numb, grunting the monosyllables of my class, spilling clichés in a feint of clumsiness, fumbling adverbs and pronouns the way my parents would bumble at a properly set table. I will fail in my art to succeed in my social disgraces. I will keep my heritage to keep the peace and put no good words to paper. To allow you your self-conception my voice will lack fertility and never produce anything more than mud, nothing more than the sediment at bog’s bottom, and leave the world with no descendants except biological progeny who may also decline the perfect poem.
4.	Paint 09:26	lyrics	buy track
White is the snow or a reminder of light. Black is night, the solution we dread and love. Ochre and umber are the earth, the splotched liaisons of dirt and rock, the ground littered with leaves, skeletons of grass resisting the wind. Crimson wells up from a scraped knee or drips off the septum to form a ragged dot on the floor. Green is cut grass rimming my shoes with its essence and trees seen from below, illuminated chlorophyll. Payne’s gray is the actual color of the sky— translucent phthalocyanine a clear sky on water— burnt sienna, the water beneath the reflections, into which I sink with chill ecstasy. All other colors are a lie or swindle. Watch out or they’ll sell you something.
5.	Mirror of the Artist 04:19	lyrics	buy track
The mirror of the artist reflects only vanity. Not the vanity of surfaces, of the daily beauty that artists handle with dexterity, but the vanity of righteousness. The artist has a secluded pulpit and a roaming voice, a pride and condemnation traveling into the unsuspecting viewer’s home, in through eyes and ears, to say who’s the holiest of them all, who’s the true prophet and judge. The mirror of the artist reflects the history of doubt. The first moments of shame brought to life by some unworldly power. The reaction of certainty and the underlying questions of worth, and the final certainty—of imperfection and failure. The mirror of the artist gives back the essence of self-pity. Like the oceans, you would think it is endless. Like a chamber of mirrors or a chain of fractals, each new look, each closer inspection is only a smaller version of the initial image, a repetition of what we already know all too well. The mirror of the artist is never a friend. Friends have something of their own to give. They don’t just boomerang the fears you’ve given them, gift-wrapped in a left-right reversal but otherwise intact. Friends distill your truths within themselves, steaming off the destruction you’ve failed to isolate, cooking out the hateful toxins, to bring back to you a balm of your own goodness, with which they will anoint you. And you, the artist, reciprocate. This is the only way an artist can step past the mirror, to give others more than vanity, self-pity and doubt.
6.	The Wish 03:06	lyrics	buy track
Folding double, cranberry lips pucker to touch the wind exuberantly. Someone not here breathes quietly in expectation. Someone lying near asks what was said, wanting explanation.
7.	Inquest 05:45	lyrics	buy track
The soft spoken inquest, as you know, has begun. It was not my idea. I assume you know that. There are things we want to know. Why is always the best place to start: It leads nowhere. Montana. Or farther north. I can hear it in your bones. Let’s go over everything again. So many. So few. That was halfway up the mesa. I’m going to keep asking. It’s the only thing I’m here for. This couldn’t have happened in Cleveland. I assume you know that. I can hear your dry eyes scratch across their lids. You ignore them when you shouldn’t. It wasn’t in Kansas. It never is. So much here is dry. That’s the purpose of questions. A lone pine and two crows. It always comes down to crows. I’m not yelling. That’s the whole point. Except for why. I’ll ask you again. You should know. Again. Why: that’s still the best place to start. I’ll say it again. You should know that. You’re so dry you can’t lick life. Again. I’m not yelling. You should know that. There were two crows. This is significant. They were not dry. Let’s get back to the central question. It was not my idea. We should always start with why.
8.	Quarantined 03:59	lyrics	buy track
I can never remember how you opened my eyes. A sound? A movement? A slight change in the temperature or electrical charge of the day? Nothing has been the same. There is some blight, both without and within, like a malignant fungus turning its host into dark slime, that makes me repellent—yet nothing so obvious. It’s more like a subliminal warning, like the smallest hint of decay that eludes you until, one day, quite by accident while looking for an onion, you open the cupboard to discover that the potatoes have turned to mush. Quarantined until final disposal, I can only watch. Even before I know of you, perhaps even before birth, some obscure law of nature or act of legislation has made my isolation a necessity. Is it any wonder that my mind enters the void when I think of you? I try to imagine what might happen should you find me and, filled with delight, come to me overflowing with love, your arms opening to engulf me…Nothing. All I see is the great expanse of impossibility.
9.	My Soul 03:15	lyrics	buy track
My soul went missing about three years ago. I don’t know how or why or exactly when. Maybe it had been gone for years, or even for decades. Maybe I let it out one beautiful spring morning and forgot to call it in. Maybe I lost it during puberty. Maybe it was afraid of falling in love and slunk away when I found someone to give my soul to. All I know is, one day I came home from work and realized I didn’t have a soul—that was about three years ago. Maybe it had died of boredom. This spring I found it caged by fence, like a criminal or animal that’s wandered into town. It had withered to nothing more than a husk with gray-green blemishes of mold spotting its yellowed skin—more pathetic than frightful. All the juices had evaporated over the winter, all the sweet pulp, so the deflective hide was buckling in on itself, lacking all substance. Not even a rattle of seeds for renewal: just a moldering husk trapped and helpless.…No wonder I recognized it. You would think a soulless person would rejoice at recovering even this decrepit morsel; the way modern people cling to everything, you would think a soul would be more valuable than a lost toy or a dog from childhood. I was unmoved, perhaps because I lack a soul. I felt no nostalgia, no compassion, no yearning: merely recognition. I left it there. Even the birds won’t touch it.
10.	Silence 12:19	lyrics	buy track
A garage door mechanically opened, whir and clank, bindings of rust—a car is driven in, a warm motor and gravel under the tires. Dogs open up, pure vocal cords; then humans open the inferior howl—a swelling barrage of yap and yell. A jet and a jet and a jet—the recurrent scream of deceleration. The hormonal extreme of cats facing off; the love and boredom and mischief of youth, the baiting and taunting, the collapse into conformity, the laughter and hush; drunks attempting invisibility one stumble at a time; car doors, kitchen doors, front doors, bedroom doors slamming; a wind twisting the cottonwood until it touches stucco walls; raccoons and dogs discovering the tip and roll of garbage cans which the wind takes over; rabbit shrieks from the mouths of fox or owl; sirens of life or death and other wails whose meaning we may never know. This is a stillness we call night. a a a Where are the dreams, the deranged reliving of yesterday, the soothing vortex of nightmares, the illogic of neurons left untended? Not a single image. Not a single sound. Or the dreary fantasies, the plots, the repetitions and minute variations of theme that build a backbeat to lullabies? Not a single word. Not a single story. What of the confusion of voices, the reiterated ideas and idiocies, the labyrinthine mob defying I and ego, the infinite monologues of undoing? Not a single vowel. Not a single whisper. Memories? All the stories and impressions and details that conform into me? What happened to that white noise of suffering? Or the drop of water falling into a pool, resembling joy? Or the slow abrasive drag of now, repeated and recalled, the temporal feedback of now, repeated and recalled? Not a single face. Not a single name. Where is that something, that nothing, that anything—that thing—called me? Not a single syllable. Not a single sensation. This is the stillness we call night.
11.	When 05:31	lyrics	buy track
We are surmounted by blue statuary. Twilight glides into night. City lights are betrayal. We stride through the lounging hours. Acolytes of destruction. There—you are almost within reach. We are limestone crumbling under fingertips. Curses percolate to the surface. And then, just before sunrise, the experiment begins.
12.	And Then Darkness Was Born...and We Found Peace 05:28	info	buy track

about

I’m back. After years of physical and mental deterioration. Slow and numb but now livelier than a corpse. New but not fresh. A resurrection, of sorts. The return of swampmessiah.
I call my stuff prattle and din. The prattle of my voice—poetry, rants, dream narratives. The din I make with household and outdoor sounds and virtual synthesizers—drones, blips, clanks, skwonks and squeals. Vaguely dark ambient or brooding soundtrack, with voiceover.
Most of these twelve recordings were assembled between August 2021 and September 2022.
Two versions of a 28-page PDF booklet included.

credits

released September 28, 2022

Original guitar tune and playing on “The Wish” by Hank Tilbury, “Ghosts on the Kaskaskia.” Used with his permission. Tractor samples also courtesy of Hank.
All compositions, words, engineering, photos, art, and InDesign layout by Michael Myshack.

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about

swampmessiah Saint Paul, Minnesota

I was born in Duluth, Minnesota in 1957. I've been drawing all my life and painting since about 1975; I started writing poetry and rants in, maybe, 1976; since 1996 I've been recording those poems and rants, usually with a "musical" backing.
I live in Saint Paul, Minnesota. My partner and I have two children. I have a day job that is in no way artistic. ... more