The Buttered Slice

Input: Output: — by PILCROW

Pilcrow — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 02:25:31 +0000

Still, sacred, silent, exploding out like hot buckshot,

Sermons, wasps, stung and shivering,

Shredded papers, strung-up kites, sunlight-stained skins,

Tanned hides, coffee grounds and vodka shots,

Mossy branches, new brown velvet, going stag,

Deep-red luscious suppurating mouth,

Smoke, oak, longer rope,

Prophecy, vice, and repetition,

Ceremony, white lines, circle and promise and surprise,

Quick, dead, playing down, awake and sleeping,

Running out of fumes,

Ecstacy and irony;

Still sacred, all aloud, bearing down like anvils,

Solid seamless tetrahedral pressure,

Wolf, ram, doe,

Cash and Carbon, Ogden, U.P.,

Silver, quick, falls through you like a train,

Two posts, two knots, parabola of laundry,

An endless arc of piss from a back window,

Cottonwillows sipping up whatever brackish water we can,

Turning air and light to life,

No narrative or sentiment,

Size, angle, speed, mass,

Trajectory and impact.

Concatenate — by PILCROW

Pilcrow — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 17:46:48 +0000

for Saylor

“It doesn’t really matter”
(a sky is heavy, even an empty space)
“It never really mattered”
(a body is heavy, even an empty vessel)
“It will never really matter”
(you mattered too much; you were real, you were more than matter)

My words carry nothing. I cannot say “you never really mattered.”

Matter has weight.
Your weight, on my shoulder, matters.

I will be your grave, if you can bear the wait
If you can bear the weight, my body can be your vessel
Your lost space.

Through a silver veil
Let my weight carry you
To a space that is light,
A sky that is full,
And to new things that matter.

Double Blind – by PILCROW

Pilcrow — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 21:33:33 +0000

To love myself, I must love the different and unknown.

We are close as strangers; I don’t know you when you laugh, or droop, or weep, or sing, or sin, or how you keep when I am gone, or where you go when I return. What stone tower, smooth and white and unadorned is this that I walk through alone?

The back of your hands,
The steel of your eyes,
The space between your breaths while you leave and then come back yourself again, but changed,
The places where you wait when I leave off and then loop back around to meet again but changed,

The fractal edges of my heart, rendered but unseen
The journeys that I make and then each one forget
The paths each pulse and impulse leave in myelin and lumen
The freight a cargo red, electric, transitional, mnemonic.
Out of these grows something sweet
Dark within, like a calf’s eye.

Seas, and skies of shining stars
Deepness grows in seeing deeper in.
Neither fathomed nor contained
Unknown, misunderstood, mislabeled, unimagined and unseen.
Each part a different part of me
Unknown, misunderstood, mislabeled, ill-used and untended,
Silence in the furthest reaches, not silent, neither unknown, nor dark at all –
Alive and feeding life with raging fire
Song that echoes in a soundless void.

In this between, where we all travel slow,
Remember all forgotten things that I still know;
Song and word and pain and tears
Dance and silence, shame and fears,
The ending of another day, another life, another friend.
The beginning of another day, another life, another friend.
Turn over the seas, turn under the skies of shining stars
I do not know you, understand you, or imagine you.

Rock Garden — by PILCROW

Pilcrow — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 22:32:46 +0000

“Some water would be very pleasant,” she said, and then sang, as they lifted her out of the ground, “God is good; do not fear death! God is good!”
Did angels visit her before she was rescued by angels?
Could I sing “God is good” after eight days pinned on my own mutilated hand under eight stories of pancaked concrete?
After being pinned eight hours to a tree, I think that I might ask my captors for forgiveness, to let me go, rather than ask my Father to forgive them. I think that I would “curse God and die.”
Every day I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing, or why.
I have no perspective on my suffering; every day, the perspective I gain on my suffering shames me.
Would she exchange my life for hers?
I pick around the itching scabs.
“We’re young men, we don’t want to die, we’re young men –
“Oh, God!” a roaring and then static, silence. More concrete pancakes, and I say “they all had the good fortune to be crushed mid-air”.
The leveled ground is a terrible blessing. I remember my disasters and compare; no daughters lost for days then found among a hundred corpses in a street outside a morgue, no hopes lost in ropes of twisted steel and wire, no wound in the earth where all I ever loved melted and exploded in a molten fire. I have: broken eggs, spankings, rejection; surely many have endured these simple pains, these heartaches, and then known many more. No men tear me from my home at night, no men throw me on the ground, no men savage my innocence with grinding, pulsing, bleeding hate. I have never been disfigured by burning tar, or even tarred. I am well-liked, respected, frequently deferred to, encouraged to raise my voice and share. I am embraced and loved for who I am and what I feel now, even if once, many years ago, I believed that I was not. I know that I am loved. I know that mountains move because I ask.
I remember being rejected, yes, but all that I have known for years now is nurturing love. Turn me towards that source of light, my hands unpinned and free. The light is very pleasant. God is good, do not fear death, nor man, nor speech, nor open heart, do not fear love nor learning how to love.
“Do not fear death,” somehow she sings; “God is good!”

Curio Nimbus — by PILCROW

Pilcrow — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:51:45 +0000


"The right reading for this is the one I'm giving it."
                                         Orson Welles

Draw God’s navel, body hair
See? all your parts were always there.

(He was a man like you, you know
Placenta to an embryo.)

Obscured by white clouds, cherubim
Are all of that which make You Him.

Draw in and then blow out your breath;
Uncover resurrection, death.

Your mortal body He forgives;
God once was dead,
And now He lives.

Tell Me What To Tell Them — by PILCROW

Pilcrow — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 04:12:57 +0000

Manage expectations
Modify desires
Moribund religion
Smoke to veil the fires

“I think this is probably the hardest thing to deal with,” he said,
and then, “whatever you choose, just make sure you are true to yourself –“
“that’s all that matters.”

Holding hands affirmed a life
Time wondering,
Watching, waiting, wanting,
Trued all the jarring angles
Even though my arms are long, and his are short,
All wariness, bitterness, dispelled.
My native wit, unpolished charm,
Bumbling stumbling burbling rolling out
We chip away at
Matters mean and great
Detached and riveted
Fixed and swinging.

Tell me, God,
Tell me how to love you both at once –
If I, your son, am known and loved, remembered, named and counted,
Spared within Your sight from all Your other sons,
Not globular but granular,
Not massed or indistinct,
Then I demand You hear this prayer.
If You are perfect You should reconcile now, not later – not after death, but now!
Me unprepared, vainglorious, intransigent, unfaithful, sightless, hopeless, angry and afraid
You came before by grace – to many – just as such
I would smother in the stinking belly of a whale,
I would pass through charring flame
(My dad once claimed he threw me to the wolves)
Let me wither from Your sight and shrink and fade and burn and die
I will not curse You or my birth or writhe indignant;

If truth is reason, give me reasons why.

If Your anointed say again “we just don’t know,”
Will I flee to, or from? This sharp comfort,
“we just don’t know,”
In the age of miracles, of fullness, attended by the living oracles
“we just don’t know”?
Who isn’t praying hard enough?
Who isn’t living up? Who here is unprepared?
What should we do but watch, want, wander,
Wither on the vine
Lose our way, and losing it
Make new friends, lovers, journeys,
Take faltering steps down faith’s last unlit stairway?
“we just don’t know,”
We just don’t what’s true.

“Burn the Book” as a Wordle — by PILCROW

Pilcrow — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 01:17:31 +0000

WORDLE takes the words from a blog post or site and composes an image by prevalence, more frequently used words appearing larger than others. Not hard to to see which word figures most prominently in “Burn the Book” :-D

Easter Song — by SQUID

Squid — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 22:21:10 +0000

[audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/Easter_Song.mp3]

Where’d your gardener go?
Has he left you lone?
Clouds began to show,
He packed up for home

Snowflakes fall
Snowflakes fall

Raise your tender shoots,
Now the winter’s gone
Beat back to your roots,
Your first bloom withdrawn

Rise once more!
Rise once more!

Slow at first to
Show your green and
Glow, your roots must
Grow deeper still
Till you press yourself against the rock;
Your thousand fibrous fingers lock
A shoring up of stem and stock;
Sure mooring in the tempest’s knock

Eyes of high passersby
Wouldn’t notice you;
Signs of glories now nigh
Only faint and few
Till the dayspring streams,
And the gardener’s dreams
Break as morning gleams

Rise once more!
Rise once more!

Metal Wave — by SQUID

Squid — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:04:26 +0000

A random ditty I made while setting up some recording equipment.

[audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/Metal_Wave.mp3]

Go On, Be Still — upcoming album, early draft — by SQUID

Squid — Sun, 31 May 2009 05:58:43 +0000

These are only demo-quality stripped down arrangements, recorded on a hand-recorder, but I figured it would do to post at least something since I’ve been promising an album for a while. Not all lyrics and titles are final, not all songs will wind up acoustic. I’m working on recording the real deal, to be released when it’s done.

        1. Chozo                     [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/01_Chozo.mp3]
        2. For the Birds             [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/02_For_the_Birds.mp3]
        3. Shadowland                [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/03_Shadowland.mp3]
        4. Adrift                    [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/04_Adrift.mp3]
        5. Breakfast with Godzilla   [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/05_Breakfast_With_Godzilla.mp3]
        6. Wake                      [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/06_Wake.mp3]
        7. All Clear                 [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/07_All_Clear.mp3]
        8. Nostalgia Dogs            [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/08_Nostalgia_Dogs.mp3]
        9. Easter Song               [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/09_Easter_Song.mp3]
        10. The Fight                [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/10_The_Fight.mp3]
        11. Midnight Snack           [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/11_Midnight_Snack.mp3]
        12. Veggie Soup              [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/12_Veggie_Soup.mp3]
        13. Go On, Be Still          [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/13_Go_On_Be_Still.mp3]

All recordings, music, and lyrics copyright Anthony Hall, 2009, except lyrics on 3 copyright Anneke Majors, 2008