Scrawled into notebooks from the familiar comforts of temporary homes and the passenger seats of mechanically unsound vehicles adrift on the highways and back roads of America, Perfect Sleeping Weather is fifteen years of thoughts, observations, facts, and fictions hammered into a collection of poetry that, according to one reader, "sounds like a sigh."
In this, his first book, writer/drummer/comedian Larry Fulford reflects on the usual -- life, death, love and leaving -- while still managing to name-check Van Halen. Twice.
Sold Out
lyrics
The candles burn not so bright tonight,
casting shadows of shit I don't need
onto walls that keep us separated,
that catch Nick Cave before he can sneak out
and climb trees, drunk on moonshine
with Townes, who I let slip out
a week or so ago with the windows up.
These sounds are for me and me alone
to swim in or float on when my arms get tired
of moving this pen and lifting this Boylan
to my childish lips that spit back into my head
all the shit I never said.
The hiatus is over. The bough’s about to break.
Cat Stevens knows it,
as do the cats who come around,
looking up at me with alien eyes as if to say,
"Okay. Any day now."
And so it goes, as I've known all along,
the rejects we're proud of,
the rejects who would accept us,
they're no kind of heroes.
Towels thrown over the shoulders of someone
coughing up blood on the bathroom floor with the shakes,
they're no kind of capes.
But they're there for us
to wipe the blood from our chins
and hold our hair back and punch us
gently in the arm to say,
“Attaboy.”
And so it goes
and we will go
down in history as sissies,
as frightened men,
capable only of taking a stand together,
armed with safety in numbers,
boomboxes on our shoulders,
bibles of youth in hand,
closed with hard covers,
ready to rumble with the thunder
of Fate's hooves galloping toward us,
down the mountain, gaining momentum,
spurred in the sides by cold riders with high calibers
and bullets of logic and reason,
old age, and mass hysteria.
We will stand our ground,
willing to get blood on our bibles
and drown out the screams
with songs.
Poet Douglas Kearney and composer/producer/drummer Val Jeanty link up for a a compelling LP that feels like the written word come to life. Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 30, 2021
