Facts are poor and pissing things
Lost in a green lawn
Where the pool was shocked
For eyes to be stung
Facts have no meaning unless shrieked
Screamed so loud they stress the picture
window and its scoop of suburb
to point of fracture
A scream smoked and peaty and single malt
“You kept sleeping you bitch
when you heard our daughter had snuck out.
Get out of that bed now.”
And then a gun made its appearance
Oddly shy and quiet the .357
Serving as punctuation, an exclamation point
On a husband’s scattered thoughts
Words too fussily labored over
This fact gone went missing amid the ph-balanced water
Gushing the next day from the side of the pool
Like innocence aborted
Forgotten, all this that happened,
In a Sunday scrum over a steaming fowl.
Archive for April, 2024
Just Facts
Posted in Poetry, tagged Poetry on April 24, 2024| Leave a Comment »
No One Hears a Zen Busker
Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre, tagged acoustic guitar, Ambrose Bierce, American primitive guitar, Americana, dogs, Entertainment, folk, John Fahey, Music, new-music, News, No One Hears a Zen Busker, rock, Salon De La Guerre on April 22, 2024| Leave a Comment »
I’m proud to announce (or I regret to inform you, depending on your musical tastes) that I have yet another album out.
Salon de la Guerre’s 36th album, No One Hears a Zen Busker, has arrived on the streaming services. For whatever reason, I’m enjoying an extremely prolific phase in my songwriting and composing career. I’ve released three albums in the last four months and I have two more dropping in the next few weeks.
I know it’s hard to keep track of, and I’m sorry if my curating skills aren’t the equal of my ability to keep churning music out as if by fire hose.
The latest set is (mostly) acoustic folk songs. I like composing on guitar, but I’ve had technical problems (including the death of my most expensive beloved microphone) that kept me from recording acoustic guitar properly for a while, which is why I haven’t released such an album since 2017, when I dropped Keep Your Slut Lamp Burning. Like that collection, this new one is about eccentric characters and folk heroes, both modern and classic. It includes Americana experiments (including a song inspired by Ambrose Bierce) and meditations on despair and joy. The usual Salon de la Guerre territory.
The album is now available on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Amazon, Bandcamp and Pandora, among other places music is streamed. Unfortunately, I still do not offer physical CDs, which would be too expensive and make this little side endeavor of mine a bit too expensive to continue.
Even as I write this blog, I’m already thinking ahead to the release of my next album, which is coming out next Monday. That one is another detour into classical music and finds me continuing in my quest to play in the fields of Prokofiev. I’ll let you know when it arrives on the streaming services.
Until then, please enjoy a sample of No One Hears a Zen Busker. As always, the music was written, performed and produced by me, Eric Randolph Rasmussen, and it was recorded at my home studio in New York City in the early months of 2024. I also took the cover photo.
You Are the Screw
Posted in Poetry on April 22, 2024| Leave a Comment »
Something to hold
Something to wrangle
They put your soul in a jail
Your ribs in a mangle
The daylight that struck you through
She knew the light in your eye
Was reflected pages of other people’s news
The cauterizing fish
Sealed fate in memories of stew
And a mother dressed as a stove
Hove a dish as easy as a sorry slur
Then sorry to have spoken or to have moved
I am both of them, thrower and thrown
Unleashed to anger when in the throat it should be sewn
I am my father’s yell and my mother’s quiet
And you could see in the long genetic party of the bridegroom pictures
Some 60 eyes of generations looking through
Looking through you
And you hove with all of them
To make the play twist forward
You are the screw
Beauty is Imperfection 