Life in the empire /The sentries sing at sunrise/ Their Gods are deader / Than the sadness in their eyes / And I am tethered / To the awaited surprise / The turn in the narrative / The truth in the lies / Where all will make sense / Be at last contextualized / Alone in their own reality / Where no one may hide

Life in the empire / Culture is an old bag / Accusing you of having / Things you never had / And some tin-eared pawn / Celebrates the new hit / While another gatekeeper / Decides if your copper slipper fits / They danced in the street / Because they thought they won / But nothing is stopping / The next flood

The songs inside me must be born / Like the clothes outside you / Must be worn / And the seawall constructed / On the cusp of Babylon / When there still were matinees / In days halcyon / Such a feat of engineering / A true union job / But praying in high-water / Bought me closer to god / May the old become new / And life continue on / We are but the remnants / Of a world that is gone

Life in the empire / Requires many saints / The selfless among us / Submitting to their fates / To tourniquet with grace / Though the wound is terminal / Who offer their shoes / With many miles to go / Their passenger faces alight / In siren red / They offer their hand in crises / Instead of retreating instead

Life in the empire / At least I have your love / In the brain-damaged polarization / None of us are above / And the sanity of our negotiation / Keeps my hope intact / I am special, I am someone / With you, as a matter of fact / And the wishes of a child / Are honored by the birds in flight / Though all the glory offered / Is a paycheck and fluorescent light

The gift I offer strangers / With a trembling hand / Is all the fury inside / We never understand / The song cycles forever / Until nature runs out of chords / Someone becomes the subject / Another impersonates the lord / And the personality imperiled / By all this hell breaking loose / With violent solutions / That cannot be refused / May the old become new / And life continue on / We are but the remnants / Of a world already gone

Goodbye Forever

Dream

Please dream

Your vivid dog dreams

Chasing the prize

Down the hill

Securing a kill

‘Tween your teeth

Days

Cold days

Alone under

The burnt-out

Sun

Undying and unwilling to

Stay

We can walk eternal

An endless jaunt together

Find a new face of earth

Its never gonna be

Goodbye forever

But you always knew

There was a chance I wouldn’t make it

Back to you

Anguish where you lie

Cause it could be goodbye forever

And we never knew

What those passing days

Would do

Treats

Here’s another treat

You’re too damn fat

But

Hard old life

Has me

Beat

In summer

Liminal summers

Hosing you down

With the backyard hose

Before you shook

Under nature’s

Thunder

You can go free

No more polite society

Make an alpha your bitch

Start a family

Its never gonna be

Goodbye forever

But you always knew

There was a chance I wouldn’t make it

Back to you

Tormented cries when we die

Cause it could be goodbye forever

And you never knew

What those passing days

Would do

A life in a mirror

Of someone’s design

With a fleeting interest

In my own mind

New, improved rules

Assimilated inside

Genuflect and pray

Before your mobile device

There’s a new boss in town

Polarized from the other guy

Queens is quiet tonight

I hate when bands make me wait

For something I’ve already seen

With survival less guaranteed

It matters less what it all means

Falling through the seasons

Of my dreams

Observing the fire hydrant ejaculating blood

On my $100 jeans

It’s hardly apathetic

Noticing where we no longer align

Queens is quiet tonight

The urgency of yesterday

Becomes an uneasy today

In a broken contract with safety

Which used to account for the price paid

And the poets always miss

The sunset’s indifference

And the politicians equate a vote

With a kind of spiritual deliverance

The Internet has fallen

And now there’s nowhere to hide

Queens is quiet tonight

My notebook’s privilege

Might be something you forgive

In the mad dream of culture

Where we both live

Somewhere a phenomena

Uncommented upon

The High School cafeteria

Is our everlasting god

But there’s little hope in it

Those trapped in the monitor’s light

Queens is quiet tonight

Streetlight

Oh streetlight

Under starlight

Guide me

Home tonight

Stranded

On 1st Avenue

And my only way to 8th

Is on these old shoes

Just passed

Beth Israel

I’m not convinced

I’m completely miserable

Bought your

EP

And there’s a tinfoil pizza

In Queens awaiting me

Third draft

In too deep

But when I get home

The neighborhood’s asleep

And who needs a life raft

When you’ve got a good buoy?

I can only live the life

Which feels true to me

If there’s no time

There’s no time

Which is yours or mine

By sunlight

The streetlight

Is godlike

From its omniscient height

And the stage in

The Map Room

Is occupied by ghosts

That could never breakthrough

I take

Attendance

Circle a bubble

To confirm a child’s existence

Tell me

How to reach you

While minding deliverance

Is beyond my purview

Everyone wants

An answer

As if it would be the same

For each and every one of them

And who needs innocence

Compared with the variety of

Experience

I’d bet your life stays the same

Whether you are one of the few

Hearing this

If there’s a streetlight

There’s starlight

There’s a beautiful, original

One-of-a-kind

Mind

A Moment or Two

Upon your balcony

You see me

Tender evening’s intimacy

Embodies mercy

In a servant’s disguise you flee

Into me

These sad things

Killed our passion with love

A quelled candle in a sleeping tomb

Where flies one lost dove

For a moment or two

Our warring families

Write no treaties

Caressing in summer’s heat

Down our dark streets

Lovers have privacy

When the city sleeps

These sad things

Killed our passion with love

A quelled candle in a sleeping tomb

Where flies one lost dove

For a moment or two

Returned to your property

Because you have to be

An appointment with an apothecary

He charges a flat fee

There should be two moons above the sea

Like your eyes are twin suns to me

These sad things

Killed our passion with love

A quelled candle in a sleeping tomb

Where flies one lost dove

For a moment or two

Sunday Planes

Sunday planes

Flying low

Through your hair

Soft and slow

We are alive

Let’s take a ride

Absurdity

Sing to me

There’s still an ambulance

Waiting for me

Beyond another

Dreamt summer

And should we part

Without a goodbye

Know you were more than enough

For a reason why

My faithful skeptic

For the rest of it

I’ll find the sweetness between

Optimism and delirium

In an empire on its knees

No longer high on helium

Without an identity

Beyond the taught and bought

Upon the cereal stained textbook page

Describing the battles we fought

Sunday brain

Power-saving mode

I’ve stopped seeing birds

Flying alone

In the blue Queens sky

Of our collective mind

Ghosts in the street

Serenade me

I’m only writing prayers

No more prophecy

Of the mercurial light

Only redefined night

Ambitions fade

Seasons leave

The flowers grow again

Before the dirt can grieve

In a clearing by the sea

Where you once held me

I’ll lean on the abstract read

Of my most contradictory components

I have little use for attention seeking

‘Nor fetishizing aloneness

If that passes for dignity

Then hell, sign me up

I’m always somewhere in the multiverse

Singing about love

The Show Do Tell Reading Series made a one-day return at Governor’s Island for the New York City Poetry Festival. I’m definitely hoping to get the series going again in a more consistent format by 2022 (or before!). But until then this lovely summer day with three extremely talented readers and my amazing fiancé recording the reading will have to do. I could not have done a facsimile of our standard format without Brendan, Amy and Aaron being awesome collaborators. Hope you enjoy!

Brendan Lorber is a poet, prose writer, and editor who lives in a little castle on the highest geographic point in Brooklyn, across from the Green-Wood Cemetery. Over two decades in the making, his first full-length book just came out. It’s called If this is paradise why are we still driving? and is published by the Subpress Collective. He’s also written several chapbooks, most recently Unfixed Elegy and Other Poems (Butterlamb) He’s appeared in the American Poetry Review, Fence, McSweeney’s, Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere.

Amy Barone’s latest poetry collection, We Became Summer, from New York Quarterly Books, was released in early 2018. She wrote chapbooks Kamikaze Dance (Finishing Line Press) and Views from the Driveway (Foothills Publishing.) Barone’s poetry has appeared in Café Review, Paterson Literary Review, Sensitive Skin, and Standpoint (UK), among other publications. She belongs to PEN America Center and the brevitas poetry community. From Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, she lives in New York City.

AARON POOCHIGIAN earned a PhD in Classics from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. His first book of poetry, The Cosmic Purr (Able Muse Press), was published in 2012, and his second book Manhattanite, which won the Able Muse Poetry Prize, came out in 2017. His third book, American Divine, won the Richard Wilbur Award and will come out in 2020. His thriller in verse, Mr. Either/Or, was released by Etruscan Press in the fall of 2017. His work has appeared in such publications as Best American Poetry, The Paris Review and POETRY.

My Inner-life’s centered

Like a good conspiracy

My back was turned overlong

Toward some memory

Where I was who they wanted to be

Faded photograph

Wrapped in a robe outside

The church

I wrote these words

Corporate daddy

Told me their worth

It was dignified work

Contaminated future bats

Taking selfies in a cave

But drink up your idealism

And think positive thoughts

Today

Cause someone will

Pay

Riding out the rain

In my mind

Underground

Guess I could’ve been someone else

If I weren’t so proud

To make this sound

I need an intruder

Nothing is not wrong

I’ve serenaded this brick wall

Through seven cycles of dawn

Internally rage at betrayal

While grinding up the seaside fortress

It’s a strange trip for a Catholic kid

Uncovering what the secular worship

The downtown world, the better future

The hijacked producing an exception

Couldn’t understand their lesson

How home should be a weapon

Well this guy from Queens

Don’t self-destruct

Because fate disobeyed

I walked my dog, I rollerbladed

Watched the Yankees play

On a blank summer day

The swan shrieked

On the trashy surf

Protecting her cygnet

We were on the trail above

Each backed up a step

Knew exactly what she meant

Synchronized

With the wind

Rolling by sunset silhouettes

A perfectly good day dies

We pay our respects

To the millisecond vignette

Objectivity

In the creature’s evening

Clingers crawling up my hair

An editor offers per-diem hours

Am I supposed to care?

Whether the city’s still there?

Carpe diem, the humidity strengthens

The illusion of actual

Time today

Edit some pages, scoop up her crap

I’m really making my way

Beside the Long Island Expressway

I need an intruder

Nothing is not wrong

Pushing away the truth

Has not made me strong

Control the sun-slant on the road

Regulate patterns of behavior

I am the undercover man

Their invisible next-door neighbor

Human contact can be too much

I dulled the arrow of my love

I couldn’t conceive a soul like you

Setting it once more, airborne, above

The Show Do Tell Reading Series and Art review returns with an in-depth review of Bob Dylan's latest album 'Rough and Rowdy Ways.' Matt also sifts through his feelings about his nonexistent personal essay about life during the pandemic, the subliminal appeal of film noir and gangster movies, and the state of the New York Yankees, who resigned venerable outfielder Brett Gardner during this episode's recording.

My new album.

‘When The Saints’ was written during the pandemic. It imagines the inner-lives of citizens of a stopped culture, while also ruminating on the healing power of love.

A note on the songs:

New York Rain -- Reinvention is always a statement of power. But true identity is more complicated. We live in our contradictions -- the characters in this song may not be morally pristine -- but they are also willing to love within their contradictions. True lovers are the champions of the world.

Untroubled Summer: Virginia Liston sings the 'Titanic Blues.'

I'll See You On the Beach in Better Days: This was the first song I wrote during the pandemic. The character is a vain failure. He disregards safety measures, takes a cynical position on science even as his existence hinges on the cure, and frequently embarrasses the woman he loves. But he's also a true romantic. And there's something admirable about his devotion to individuality. An unaffiliated man -- accomplishes nothing and breaks nothing.

A Free Citizen Sleeps: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.” -- Henry David Thoreau

Cold Twilight: Apathy must be investigated. Not immediately rebuked on moral grounds as a show of sincerity. Civic responsibility may feel grounded in assumption when compared to the abstract quality of individuality and memory.

Broken State: The coda is a prayer. Often, it is up to us to answer our own prayers.

At the End of This Earth: The testament of one roadie's life and times in the twenty-first century. Except much of his life has been spent gazing at the singer whom he services. One person's burdens are another's blessings.

The Watchman Reflects: One professional's life stored in the eyes of a painted woman on a wall. When the museum is closed, he goes alone to look.

Intelligence: You may notice several songs on the album reference the world stopping. For a brief moment last spring, before it all went mad, there was an existential angst amid the fear and anger. One could actually see the system stopping -- almost like the sidewalks had reversed -- so we walked forward to get backward. Temporarily, loss and gain were negated. All had become theoretical. I actually was not what I thought I wanted. I was less, so therefore more. Such a mentality seemed to suit a character who'd done extremely consequential things in a highly conscious way, for a specific end. To fool them he had to fool himself too.

Hidden Green: As society inevitably revolutionizes itself we must find ways of strength which cannot wear out -- changeless as the world can seem when we are in love in it.

Night Driving: Holy headlights, guide us safely on our journey through evening's mystery. The imperceptibility 'tween 45 MPH and 50 -- dark matter where sound becomes song.

(Night Driving was inspired by Sylvia Plath's poetry)

New Year's Dream: Inspired by my love.

Presiding: Ultimately the quietude of space was rather lost on me until I was looking *up* with the one I love.

Finally Tonight: Waiting, finitude, forever -- these great forces we graze against in our simple little lives animated by love.

Luck & Love: This song was never supposed to be this song. It was supposed to be something which I now do not remember. These lyrics I believe to the fullest.