The Outsourcing

Now I have joined you, fair fortune,

a last wandering descent 

through a netherworld of 

fast-fallen summer days, 

blank as an avalanche against 

gray-swept hillsides of years and youth,

in a thousand June backyards struck 

beneath the weight of soft ambitions.

We have been found wanting,

fallow, misshapen souls

floating the tree-lines and jagged roofs

of our dread cutout wilderness,

our blood which stains the blade

in the rust and tarnish of black centuries 

and off-years, moments spent 

wandering lost behind 

the Interstate noise-wall.

This saltwater in our ragged lungs,

it stings like the thoughtless fury

of phalanxes of dark-faced hornets, 

an outpost along the edges of endless outskirts.

These days remain in malformed erasure,

not even static to bless the bones of the weary house,

or the tangled sheets on a sour-stained mattress. 

We, wounded immortals, 

who flung rocks against the barricades

and expected all of Babylon to drop 

to quivering knees at our approach!

We who clasped hands with spirits in sleep,

only to release them in curse and spell-craft

in the washed-out sun of regretful dawn.

I find I still have eyes to see with,

fingers that still grace skin,

or the torn vinyl of the frozen car seat.

Our lives cracked like a luck-starved mirror,

at the very tremble of half-touched hearts

in the weight of all these ashen mountains.

These were the finest hours,

traced with thin gold lace and amethyst,

but now they're burned through

by candles tipped against the windows,

the wax rotting away the the thread,

the glass warping and melting 

in miniature inferno.

And the spires and stacks of this 

aching nest of city streets

sliced the sky like solemn knives,

beaten back by the arctic glare

of a billion aching stars,

of light pollution lingering around 

the blinking code of radio towers.

You whom I've known since childhood,

you whose serpent's breath 

and doubled-over mirth 

had swept me in your tempest,

do you not stand today amongst

the graves and gallows of a 

haunted continent,

and shout at me from

topographies unimagined?

Dusk catches us sleepwalking again

and follows us home,

showing up in the dead hiss of 

tape recordings or the howling shift 

of images lurking in the VHS.

Sometimes, beyond the flames

that lick and jump in anxious fervor,

there's a face without expression,

wrapped in solace and in shadow.

Breathless and struck, we still continue, 

with memories strewn behind abandoned.

Ask: what will map our silent crossings when we're gone?

Last night the crows fell like a shroud on wings

of brutalist charcoal, 

and swallowed the barn whole in their icy cries.

This doorstep is peeling away like a false awakening,

a wake held beneath the churning waves of spent woodgrain.

Oh, how the painted yesterdays sway with drunken footfalls,

entwined in heady mist of spilled wine and hoarse cheers,

as we, scythe-like, mow apart the autumn age of remembering.

There is no more distant wavering shoreline,

no lapping surf to hide your clawing wants,

they are leaving in a line towards the veiled orange gloom,

and they will not soon be returning.

Whatever was loved is permanently sunstruck,

statuesque and paralyzed, left to devour away 

on a tide of furrowed countenances,

of heads glancing backwards in sorrow recognition,

of hands dragged beneath the surface of a love 

that never found its shining season,

and lays drunk and dazed, half-alive,

in the vined ruins of a disappeared evening.

Solstice On Twin Mountain Road

Old friends, winter has arrived 

pale and shivering 

on our splintered gray doorstep,

brushing bits of snow from his sorrow cloak 

with red-raw, gnarled hands,

black eyes gazing inward

through frosted fields of stalks and wire,

and contrails traced through 

the piercing yawn of Christmas skies.

Let's wander these wooded labyrinths 

beyond the house's reach,

the thrum of the far-off cars reaching us

like trapped spirits lingering past our vision,

and press frozen arms around the limbs 

of the trees we find most haunting,

with their freight of abandoned

squirrel's nests in a rafter 

of brown-clustered branches.

We'll watch that somber evening blue descend 

like a sudden silence each evening, 

and mark the house-lights

through the evergreens across the meadows,

bathing the scarred earth in golden shadow. 

Sofa Set On Fire Beside A Derelict Warehouse

A tattered sofa in gray-burnished winter

collapses softly into itself near 

the boarded-up warehouse, 

unmoored in a nest of untidy shadows,

yellow stuffing hemorrhaging through 

the split seams in filthy cushions,

stained by generations of unnameable 

ghost drinks and fluids,

discarded decaying in the faded entropy 

of the Queen Anne's Lace,

with the styrofoam scraps and the shattered glass.

The seizing electric flames lick chemicals 

from the combustible surfaces,

sending pillars of exotic spectrums 

and vivid smoke skyward,

through frosted dusk air,

to evaporate into a black starless void. 

Haiku 5

In fallow meadow,

the rust clings to the withered blade, 

a pagan embrace. 

Haiku 4

A thin latticework

of ice on the dawn windshield,

as winter descends.

Haiku 3

Falling birches roar

like a piece of missing time 

as they strike the ground.

Haiku 2

These lights are pinpoints,

trailing off into the dark,

never to return.

Haiku

I am alone in

the roaring circumference 

of twilight shadows.

The Weight Of Years

The weight of years

all collapsed and broken in the yard,

left to corrode in a ruinous winter rain

between many draping stalks,

all stuffing-sprung and leaking

days months hours like black-tipped toxins, 

to ferment along the crumbling

banks of the drained and fallow stream-bed,

evaporates to fine dust when touched,

yet lingers like a hand pressed against

a curve of shoulder at the blue hour. 

Across Causeways

I have left you behind, old ocean,

blithely erased your midnight churnings 

from down wind-tipped streets

of empty wood-panelled sandboxes, 

like typing a fence-line of black X's 

across a misspelled word on the page. 

These were summer nights

where bright-banded constellations 

seemed vast enough

to swallow our youth whole,

as we lazed drunk and bewildered

in the rickety lifeguard watch-stands. 

Or the blue mornings of February

walking to the corner for the bus,

rifles booming hollow and black

from the duck blinds out in the reeds.

Past hundreds of miles of 

snake-crawled swamp and 

woods and yawning fields,

I still wake sometimes and feel

you lapping your fragmented shore,
somewhere out in all that darkness.

Lonely Places

The wind-whistled Siberia of mall parking lot

that stands vacant and weed-strewn 

save for shopping holidays,

and where it meets vast tides of 

gray fields racing into a distant nowhere.

A pool crusted over by a billowing tarp

in the seasons of staying indoors, 

crumpled leaves clinging to the rusted cyclone fence,

the blue fabric flapping like a dazed ghost

as the gust lazily stirs its edges. 

The sense of absence between two homes, 

glancing resigned over your shoulder at 

whatever you're treading away from,

rather than a future's beckoning. 

Afterimage

You and I, we've known the feeling

of stumbling across black and depthless woods

towards where a fire still churns listless smoke

into a pallid, dusky sky, 

chairs left empty moments before,

some tipped over as if in sudden flight.

Or, the lasting sense of disturbance

after all the players have left 

the baseball field,

and the last machine having towed its burden 

of shattered wreckage from

the cold nightmare of the highway accident. 

A bare intuition that something has happened

just moments before your graceless intrusion, 

now left haunted and lingering in

currents of force at the unsettled margins. 

This is what Burlington feels like in November.

Gravitational Pull

I have felt a weight 

like a collapsing house pouring down around me,

littering its splintered doors and 

jagged runners of glass in my hair, 

opening veins for blood to seep 

through clutched hands into a darkening nowhere.

This quiet inertia will eventually pull the stars from their 

fixed coordinates, 

drag the very sky itself into the black hollows of the earth,

to disappear beneath an undisturbed surface

with me at its center,

dazed by flaming years too bright to see directly.

Faceless Form

There is a strangeness to a figure glimpsed at a distance,

whether trailed down a deserted twilight street,

or standing statue-like in an overgrown yard,

like a black chalk-mark against an overcast sky,

features indiscernible from across this void, 

but clearly staring in your direction. 

It's as if such a spirit

could pull the very landscape down around them,

with a wordless raising of fists, 

or a silent nod. 

Early October In Burlington

Gold-washed autumn has descended these hills 

like some conjured bit of wicked magic, 

stilling the green-wreathed leaves in their festive sway

to send them sailing to a colder soil;

they gather littered in storm drains and 

at the edges of driveways,

crisp and crackling.

Night-dark steals in a little earlier than before,

and the highways clear of all vacation traffic

as if an alarm has sounded somewhere,

indicating swift retreat.

These later hours stay tinged by woodsmoke and rust,

curling through the parted curtains

of upstairs bedrooms, 

as the earth slumps away from the sun. 

Old Songs Revisited

Autumn is a time when a dangerous emotion tends to sneak and coil into my musings: nostalgia, that old seductive euphemism for loss and regret. Maybe it's the quality of the slanting yellow light, the sudden chill in the air and the scent of woodsmoke in the evenings. Fall is such a wistful season.

Digging through boxes still left unpacked with Denny this past weekend, I discovered some very embarrassing early attempts at song-craft, visions of teenaged cliched angst too awful and humiliating to be reprinted here. Tonight though, on a break from recording new material for my full-time project, I found myself playing some other songs of a more recent vintage, folk songs I had written for prior bands, and myself, at the turn of this last decade. Many of them are admittedly just as awful as the fifth-grade radio-metal imitations, and in hindsight I find myself very glad to be expressing myself instead through instrumental music, poetry, and photography/film these days.

Five years is a long time, and though I'm still young, I find my singing voice (which I've never cared for in the least) has changed quite a bit since these songs were written. Gone is much of the Oberstian whining, replaced with a hoarse, huskier tone. I suppose this reflects everything that has changed in the past five years of my life. These songs are lived-in in a way they weren't before, as fresh, painful gashes. And the lyrics are just too personal to share on an Internet blog, or anywhere.

When I moved to Raleigh in 2008, in the wake of an aborted college career and an emotionally turbulent relationship, I was adrift and an outsider. Looking back on the lyrics of these songs, they're confrontational and angry in a way that shocks and saddens me now. I didn't realize as a vitriolic, outspoken twenty-four year old that all that seething was masking some serious fear, a serious sense of isolation. These songs pine nakedly for a Boone that was even then vanishing, for a love that was never the right combination of personalities to last, for a youth that was as impermanent as late spring snowfall and just as tempestuous. These songs lash out at everyone around me at the time, at a new town that didn't feel like home and where I didn't feel accepted, and at my own mistakes. I didn't realize that I was the one cutting myself off, retreating on my own terms, withdrawing from the world.

Having found a partner and a love again, seeing more success than frustration at last with music, all that fear and rage seem very foreign to me. These are bitter, unpleasant songs, lyrics that poured out of me like automatic writing, that I didn't analyze for content at the time but which now speak pretty deeply to who I was circa 2008-2010. I simply hadn't remotely figured out who I was yet.

The process continues, of course.

-----

A final thought - something strange occurred to me driving back late to Burlington from elsewhere last night. This city shuts down quite dramatically at 5PM on weeknights; the traffic lights downtown turn to flashers and the streets empty as if by some wicked magic. I came to this conclusion:

Burlington is a part-time apocalypse.

ZC

October Country

This is the time of year in Burlington when the days remain as hot as July's worst sweltering waves, but the nights are suddenly crisp and cool, a sort of first glimpse of the autumn lurking just over the edge of the calendar. At night in our upstairs bedroom with the windows open, the rich tang of burning fields carries on the gentlest breeze. A hint of woodsmoke and an imagined season of axes in blackened stumps and hot cider around campfires. Halloween is already lingering in the slanting yellow light, the darkening air of our patch of North Carolina.

Driving to Charlotte a couple of nights ago for a show, it occurred to me how vast and empty the highways in our state tend to be. None of the narrow serpentine curves and headlong traffic of the northern cities, just endless vistas of fields with the occasional neon sign sprouting on steel legs above a cluster of pines. Maybe it's that touch of sadness that creeps in with the coming fall, the lingering traces of bittersweet nostalgia in the atmosphere, but our interstates seemed to me lonely roads trailing off into the ether, a compass point reached and not returned from.

An Old House Seen In Passing

An Old House Seen In Passing

The empty house on the hill tips into the chill wind

like a ship crawling port-ward, listing drunkenly

in a vast-sea void of  tangled dry grass and 

dead barbed-wire fences,

The window-frames hollowed and vacant,

even the doors pried from their hinges

in the swirling backwash of drowned years.

In an upstairs room, a cracked mirror

hides unknowable depths, 

blinded by a yellowed sheet.

The boards warp and twist 

as the water bleeds across the sagging ceiling, 

and the doorways hold little

except the cold, and the hours. 

Tour Blog Wrapup

Hi everyone, 

Still exhausted and recovering from tour, so I'm going to make this 'wrapping up' blog entry fairly brief. This was definitely the most fun and headache-free tour yet, and I want to extend thanks once again to my tourmate Proud/Father (Sebastian Figueroa) for putting up with me so well for three weeks of constant travel.

The stories from this tour would take many, many blog entries to tell, and I alas am lacking the energy. But here are a few sentences about each place since the last blog posting, to give you a general overview of how things went down -

Winchester, Virginia - A fun night at a local bookstore capped with stellar performances from local avant-noise friends Guillermo Pizarro and Christopher S. Feltner. Photographed an incredible abandoned house outside of town and enjoyed the cool mountain air. 'Twas a most enjoyable, mellow day on the tour.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - Indebted to Tibbie X (bassist for Reagan Youth) for letting us crash at her lovely apartment and enjoy conversation and guitar geekery. No show this evening, but I'm glad we stopped in Philly all the same. Tried to track down some Toynbee Tiles and failed, ah well. Philadelphia was still much fun.

Williamsburg, Brooklyn - Played on a rooftop (thirteen floors up!) with an incredible panoramic view of the Manhattan skyline. Despite the chilly winds and headache-inducing load-in/load-out procedure, was a great deal of fun with lots of awesome new friends. Special thanks to Alec Fellman for letting us crash, as well.

Bushwick, Brooklyn - Silent Barn! A slim turnout but still a fun noise set, and got to meet Ben Goldberg from one of my favorite labels, Ba Da Bing! Even sold him some jam. The Silent Barn folks were friendly and accommodating and the space was awesome. Thanks to Gio Andollo of GioSafari, and his awesome pug, for the hospitality in letting us crash that night in Harlem. Was very much appreciated.

Florence, Massachusetts - Spent the next two days at my aunt and uncle's lovely mountain home in rural western Massachusetts. Explored an abandoned quarry and an abandoned roundhouse, and had a fun night live on Valley Free Radio in nearby Florence. Was most surprised to see a Greenville friend, Matt Epstein, turn up at the studio to hang out with us! Weather was lovely, and family spoiled myself and my friend as usual. It was almost a shame to leave to head north.

Portland, Maine - SPACE Gallery, performed for a First Friday event while live yoga was conducted in front of us. An intriguing, interesting night. Was especially impressed by our local opener, Remy Brecht. Beautiful dark ambient washes. 

Providence, Rhode Island - Benefit festival at 95 Empire for Lisa Carver's son Wolf. Avant garde to the extreme. We were grateful for the hospitality of new friend and  ambient wizard Claudia for letting us stay where she was housesitting, a lovely suburban home where we were glad to recharge. Thanks for everything, Claudia!

Buffalo, New York - Probably my favorite night of the tour. TJ Borden's gloriously decaying Victorian manse had much to offer in terms of pure kindness and hospitality, and we were massively grateful. Buffalo seems like a spectacular town.

Coal Center, Pennsylvania - An amazing internet-based conceptual art performance from old friend NYKDLN (Scott Michael) kicked off this mellow basement show in coal country in western PA. Streamed the show live. Thanks to Derek Bendel for pulling it all together. The evening was beyond fun.

Cincinnati, Ohio - Steve Kemple runs an eclectic series of experimental music performances at the local main branch library, and we were stoked to be a part of it. Got to meet Jude from one of my favorite blogs, Half Gifts, which was a bonus. Cincinnati definitely treated us well, as did where we crashed over the river in KY.

Hazel Park, Michigan - Got to fiddle around on a Rhodes Mk 1 electric piano at this great cafe/artspace just outside of Detroit, and ran into a lot of old Detroit friends it was nice to see. Spent the next day photographing the largest abandoned factory in the world (the former Packard Assembly Plant). Detroit is always fascinating in its ruined beauty, and it's even more decayed now than when I was last here in 2011.

Chicago, Illinois - Living Room Visions friends David Seeber and Tyler Andere pulled this house show together, and it was a chance to finally meet longtime online friend Justin Mark Lloyd in person, as well. A rewarding night all around, and my first visit to Chicago turned out to be a stellar one. Thanks to David especially for being so kind and welcoming. We'll definitely be coming back.

Cape Girardeau, Missouri - A bar show put together by Wes Ables of Public Spreads The News turned our highest profit of the tour, and Wes and his crew couldn't have been more accommodating. Despite equipment issues, Wes had an incredible show that was definitely one of my favorites of the tour. A charming town.

Lexington, Kentucky - We were a bit late for this show due to the time change and regrettable roadwork, so a slim crowd turned out for us. Definitely the most challenging show of the tour. But hospitality prevailed and we spent a great night watching cheesy sword-and-sorcery films and oddball documentaries where we ended up crashing. I hope we can come back to do things more properly soon.

Asheville, North Carolina - So good to be back in NC! Got to see a lot of great Asheville friends, including some college pals who'd recently moved there. Static Age Records, the Moog factory, and other fun Asheville sights were beheld. Extra special thanks to friends David and Meghan (of the Divine Circles/Lunar Creature/US Christmas family) for providing us a comfortable couch to sleep on and a VERY friendly cat to share it with. One consistent thing on this tour, besides Dr. Bronner's in every shower stall, is the presence of friendly cats. This was the friendliest. 

Lansing, North Carolina - My friend and experimental bassist Nic Slaton runs a winery in this tiny NC mountain town, part of a larger artspace/hostel cooperative in an old elementary school known as Fort Awesome. Hanging out with childhood friend Tyler Davidson and Boone pal Jordan Barger made this night a special occasion and a lovely way to (almost) wrap up the tour. Laid back outside show.

Greensboro, North Carolina - At last, the end of the road, at Sam Martin's home in Greensboro, where my tapes were destroyed with a hammer and I was gratefully reunited with my wife and bandmate. A perfect end to a nearly perfect tour.

I'm sure I'll write more about this trek when I'm a little less exhausted, but for now, there it is. Check out some photos from the road here - https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10100805578820678.1073741853.29708910&type=1&l=94cab7872c and I'll be posting some performance photos and videos eventually, as well. 

This is the last tour for awhile, I think. I'm glad it was a fantastic one! Cheers, ZC

Day 1 - 3: Greenville, NC - Winchester, VA (Part One)

Hi folks,

My apologies for the lack of blogging lately. I’ve been getting ready for the tour I find myself currently enmeshed in, traveling the East Coast and Midwest for three weeks with my friend Sebastian, aka Proud Father, from the ruins of New Orleans.

As tours go, three days in everything is kosher and still fresh and fun, though I know exhaustion looms on the horizon like the scaffolding of some ominous pirate ship cruising hazardous waters. Our first day was spent in Greenville, NC at Rat & Slug, one of my favorite houses to play (and partially run by a friend from back home).

Rat & Slug is your typical punk house, a bit dirty (as the name implies), a bit precarious and crumbling, but warm and inviting nonetheless, a collapsing old house near campus surrounded by waves of wandering cats. My good friend Charles Wright offered blistering waves of harsh noise and destruction in a performance that left a lot of us jaw-dropped. Charles always seems to ‘trance in’ to his music, sipping tea and lighting incense while building stunning walls of pure sound fury. This was by far the most intense set of his I’ve seen, culminating in the demolition of a guitar neck violently hitting a metal canister. Our own sets went as well as first nights of a tour tend to do, a few minor equipment issues aside, and the night descended into DJ’ing and revelry. Rat & Slug is the perfect sort of low-key, friendly environment in which to begin a tour.

After a night on a floor we rolled back west for a stop at Scrap Exchange in Durham, my favorite junk store. Having gathered some amazing VHS/cassettes for sampling, and even a few gorgeous 35mm slides of a forested cemetery somewhere, we moved on to Richmond, Virginia, one of the most flat-out beautiful cities on the planet and one of my favorite places to play. The corner coffee shop we always begin our East Coast tours at is Globehopper, and it’s one of those half-discovered miracles of city life with delicious food and drink tucked away in an intriguing part of town. Another easy pair of sets and a little vegetarian Chinese food later, we drove north into the vast night to spend it on sleeping bags beneath giant oaks at a KOA Kampground near Fredericksburg.

Now we’re in the lovely, apple-obsessed mountain town of Winchester, Virginia, awaiting a show at Winchester Book Gallery (seriously, one of the most incredibly stocked book/record/video stores of all time) tonight with old friends Christopher Feltner and Guillermo Pizarro, two noise folks we’ve hosted in Burlington before. We’ve got a lot of time to kill in these pretty little town, so I’ll catch you folks later. Till then, ZC

PS - Photos pending. Already hit a sweet semi-abandoned stockyard and an abandoned house.

Pines

Hello folks,

I have a new instrumental folk side project called Pines. You can listen to the first song over at our new blog, www.pinesofnc.blogspot.com, and like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/pinesnc

More soon, thanks!

As Safe As Houses

This house warps and melts like a 

wedding cake in fragrant summer,

each molded corner bleeding into 

the door-frames.

All the furniture is hemmhorraging

its stuffing, regretful and dolorous.

We could peel strips of the faded hardwood

away with our fingertips,

grasping furtively some sense

of decayed mystery beneath the boards,

where the earth meets the hearth.

The fireplace is still choked with coal dust,

and there's pale squares

where paintings once hung

in lost days of antiquity. 

Even the windows,

with their burden of busy insects and

swiftly-rusting screens,

are a reference point in glass.

Cut-Out Ghosts On A Wall

Halloween weather lingered over the city 

like an incantation,

heavy gray brushstrokes cresting against

the dead fields swept beneath the overpasses,

with leaves and scraps of paper pressed against

rusted fences at the airport's wind-blown boundaries.

Over the sullen scrim of ice that was the river,

radio lights burned feverishly 

through spires of black pine woods.

They left afterimages burned into our vision

as we staggered past the edge of the yard towards the house.

Our bulkhead is wired shut, our boots wet from slush,

and there's a sense of anticipation that's balanced like some

dark photographic negative over the 

paint-less boards of the porch,

where we sat head in hands, 

shivering and remembering.

Communique

This is a prose-poem-essay dealie that I contributed to the zine WYRD DAZE recently...

I have seen the march of powerlines across the landscape. Neat symmetrical arrangements of shimmering steel and wire that carry lightning between two axes, two balanced ends of a ruined and withered spectrum. These are the capillaries, the bloodstreams, the veins strung taut in ribbons. City to city and house to house, stirring each convenience to vivid life and light. We've watched it all on television. 

I've seen the deepest and secretest of gray-washed winter woods laid naked and ravaged by the earth-moving blade, the rusted rumble of gears and the lingering trace of filthy oil at the edge of a future building site. Where autumn once held her orange dominion, now miles of spidery commuter suburbs with tarped-over aboveground pools and red-cedar swingsets in the yards, sacks of poisons lurking in the eaves of the garage. Each cul-de-sac a dead void where mystery had laid down sighing. I've seen the uniformity like corpses arranged in a pagan circle.

I've seen the edge of great and spreading centers of commerce, where the blinking polestar signals of radio towers jostle amidst fields of white oil tanks and grim and sterile office parks, where toxins spill from the strangled rivers into the sumac and half-submerged shopping carts of a hesitant reservoir. I've seen the boundless pouring freeways, their many-shadowed overpasses scarred with the dim graffiti of teenage malice, glaring halogens and passing whims within easy steering. I've seen the interchanges and toll plazas, the false shrubs and noisewalls, the gaping tombstone hollows of ghost-boxes and rippling vacant-grinned airdancers. I've glimpsed the flickering headlights through the hazy amputated median forests on northbound lanes at midnight. I've seen the dreary beige fields of your outlands, North Carolina. I've seen where the layers of your progress give way collapsing.

I've seen the plumes of smoke from countless streaming Superfund chimneys. I've grown within reach of your abandoned mills of brick and soot and shattered, pebbled glass. I've seen your vinyl furniture set ablaze in a meadow beside a corrugated warehouse. I've seen your hangings, your phantoms, your sense of loss and your obsessive skeleton key past. I've seen the blood and chalk of your senseless sidewalk shootings, I've seen the drugs you can't purge from your system for the minimum wage food court job interview. These halogens aren't flattering to your skin. You could see a doctor if only you had the insurance.

I've seen these soldiers bored on their toted bedrolls. I've seen these police trailing you home if your skin is a shade too brown, Alamance County. Your harrowed realm is a witch's spellcraft, a ghost at the banquet, a lingering omen, a portentous sense of dread, unspeakable nightmares half-glimpsed moving in the darkness of an unknown alley or a haunted mountaintop wood. I've seen Other Burlington, and I've seen the distant lights of her awakening. I've seen the squadrons of black southern birds racing the moon and its tangles of drifting cloudbank. You're a seance, Old North. You raise the dead wholesale and sell them off cut-rate for a mall that'll rot derelict in fifteen years if business is booming. I've seen your taxidermy. I've seen your desperate, hallowed malingering, pulse fading, pressed in glass and trapped in amber. Your history is our own. The diaries you keep are stained with trails of errant ink, an NC carved in a wax seal, moldering. Your name is light pollution. Your name is a mirror. Your name is Gomorrah. Your name is consuming without regret to fill oblivion. Your name is lurid logos and leering billboards, beckoning from the highway to the death-sprawl that lurks just beyond a discreet tree-line. Your essential entirety is outskirts and borderlands, Tar Heel. You're an abandoned car filled with dread rumors on the side of a forgotten exit, aswarm with wasps. You forget how I've seen your boarded up windows on tenements and your forgotten asylums, your overcrowded hospitals and old folks' homes. You can't keep a history like that from one of your own, friend. I've seen how your trailer parks and driving ranges wither to ash in the falling twilight.

I've waited for Shearon Harris to go red and fill the sky with pouring radioactive rain. I've seen your cars piled in flames on cloverleafs etched against the chemical sunset. I've seen your terrified jet passengers bracing for the final descent into doom. I've seen your saw-blade and your axe chip efficiently, coldly away at the marrow of our green hills and plains. I've seen your hulking ships swaying in your salted tides. You are a nondescript parking lot down an access road. You're the empty pursuit of material perfection, a sanding away of edges and of character, a gated development with high walls and identical center-hall floorplans and anonymous magnet schools arranged within easy walking distance of shopping. I've seen it all since childhood: a veil lifted, a decay and a fever and a longing and an ache. I've seen the answers to your questions. I've seen the tarnish setting in. 

And still, beneath the curled veneer, I've seen the fox, the bear, the deer, the red wolf. Still I've seen the cool and bubbling rock-hewn streams, the black and endless wetland channels. Still I've seen the swarms of pine woods navigating the valleys. We've been there with our broken technology all along. We've been there with our warbling, dying VCR, our stained and eerie Polaroids, our scratched and blurring Super 8. We've been there with our cassettes set always to 'record'.

This is your salvation. This is your invitation to the ball. Your denouement is here, North Carolina. There's no more escaping or warding it away, no turning back. Approach this final abyss within. Critical mass has been breached and surpassed. The end is already set in motion and cannot be reversed. Brace for a coming storm.

Soon, we will begin disappearing like an old-time rapture. Every mailman, every gun-happy small-town sheriff, every crooked elected official, every perpetual and lethal widow adding arsenic to the glass, every drink-addled fraternity pledge stumbling through the gutters of Chapel Hill, every sunburned crabber, every soccer mom at Briar Creek in her SUV with stick figure family enumerated proudly on her back windshield, every buzz-cut Fayetteville recruit, every Durham gang-banger, every genteel old tobacco executive in their fading antebellum mansions, every bearded vegan barista in Asheville, every Seagrove potter, every family, every man, every woman, every child. We are vanishing from the very yards where we grill on the Fourth of July in preparation for fireworks. We are vanishing from behind our rubber Halloween masks in the thick of the spirit hour. We are vanishing from Christmas dinner, from lounging in front of Thanksgiving football. We are vanishing from winter, spring, summer, fall. This is the song of our departure.

And when we lift to the ceiling of your very burnished skies, we leave not the thinnest legacy behind, no pure illumination, no cast of light to impart that we were once a people, a community, a state, a home, save perhaps for one solemn and dying voice trailing like a streamer on the faintest hint of wind, bristling through the empty streets and down the silent travel lanes below rows of dead and leaning streetlights, from ocean floor to red clay ridge, between the broken skylines. A voice that insists, plaintively and pointedly, that I have seen the end of all I've ever loved and known, and I have seen the march of powerlines across the landscape. 

Heart and hope, love and entropy. Yearning and magnetic pull. Anchors and orbits. Dawn and the new bourgeoning. Names that now can never be unspoken.

Tear every city asunder. Sow new oats over the hallowed ground of this ruin. Break apart the elevated freeways with your hands and crush every skyscraper into powdered glass. Stomp every mall flat into the earth it trampled to be born. Unearth the bones from every graveyard. Erase every sidestreet and every stadium and every cinema, every drive-thru and every satellite station and every rock-flung shore, and brush over every trail with withered leaves until it's all a white expanse on the map, unremarked upon, unremembered, gone. Snap every smokestack and spire and roofline in two. And when everything's gone, begin to build again.

Bourgeoning Summer

All of the doors in the house closed at once, 

a dread chorus of gallows trapdoors banging shut

in the wake of chilled wind

that trailed through the house

like ice particles stirred to lively animation.

The sky wallowed in its sullen, amber pall,

little drifts of gray leaves dancing away up the road,

to where the bridge swayed drunkenly with 

each hollow, booming gust, 

recoiling snake-like from the 

bright purple frost of descending lightning.

This is the kind of rain

that washes seasons away whole, 

shrieking into the maw of raw yesterdays,

all bent backwards into oblivion.

10:37 PM, June 12th

On Burlington summer evenings

the darkness seeps in by degrees,

a silently falling veil

erasing the blue from neighborhood skies

to carve the night black,

the backyard trees bathed in the halogens

of rusted streetlights,

both etched like skeletons in the vast gloom.

This is a dark so deep

that it changes all perception,

doubles and redoubles distances

like a funhouse mirror,

conjuring unimaginable distortions.

Tiny lightning-bug beacons

stitch their invisible thread

between the stalks of stubborn timothy

by the worn back steps,

while the heat drips down from the air

like a wavering ghost of last week's rain.

Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters

When I was a child in the hills of western Massachusetts, I was convinced I loved summer more than any other kid in town. Summer meant watergun fights and late-night soccer matches in the meadow across Granville Road, chasing fireflies through leafy woods in the massive nature sprawl of Stanley Park, and the weekend block parties our neighborhood would throw on a few occasions each season, the thick tang of charcoal grilling and pool chlorine hanging almost solidly in the air. Despite the mosquito bites and the constant shadow realization of school letting in again soon, summer was a clear glass jar of freedom in a shapeless year. 

As I grew, I began to love summer less and less, a boy becoming a man and aging out of feverish childhood passions. Once we moved to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, summer meant endless traffic trapped in sun-sticky, brutally hot cars. It meant the occasional blithe rudeness of the tourists at whatever hellish retail outlet you spent the summer toiling for. I was never a beach kid; a part of me always yearned desperately for those cool Massachusetts summers again, likely more idyllic in my memory than they were in reality. Adulthood tends to mean a great deal of revisionist history where our younger days are concerned. Still, a halcyon glow surrounds the very thought of those summers even now as I approach thirty.

Now my cherished time of the year is fall and winter. Maybe I've just change fundamentally as a person, but as they say, you can always bundle up but you can't take your skin off to escape the heat. Winter and autumn are times to wander the orange, freshly-bare woods at Shallow Ford, to navigate endless fields of dead yellow grass beneath boundless, overcast gray skies, to wrap yourself in a sweater and drink hot chocolate while you string holiday lights on the front porch, your breath fogging in the raw chill as the freights wail through the center of town. I'm not a dark person by nature (despite the themes of much of my art), but I love the mysterious pull the colder months have. Summer is a stagnant fog of haze in comparison, and moving through its syrupy warmth simply feels exhausting. 

Perhaps I'm lucky. I've experienced passionate love for most of the year, but at different perspectives and levels of maturity throughout my life. For now though, I'm very much counting the days until it's time to carve pumpkins and build bonfires and burrow under covers once more. I'm aching for that first hint of frost in the air sometime in late August, that subtle shift of light to a more prosaic yellow that will tell me that my time is on its way to my door again. I'll try to enjoy summer in the meanwhile.

"And then it is raining 'cause Halloween is coming,

so close you can smell it right against your face."

                           -Thanksgiving, "There's No Invisible Halloween Costume That Isn't There"

Washing Dishes In The Vast Night

Our house here in Burlington is a continuing revelation to me, a simple wonder slowly unraveling with the passing seasons. The rambling, strange design of this 1910 folly offers unending surprises and tiny, mysterious secrets to pry open. We moved here for the space; Denny wanted a larger kitchen than we had in Hillsborough, and I wanted room for recording in a more atmospheric setting, something imbued with cobwebs and a little dusty age. I had known the area from past visits (good friends attended college nearby), but the house was what drew me in, a towering old relic bound with aging gray siding and burgundy shutters, wrapped with an endless porch and skirted by an expansive, sprawling yard.

There's much to love about our large but modest home. Details leap into focus for me even as I type this post. The tarnished squares of faded white where pictures once hung on the walls, the elegant curve the staircase takes in its final steps descending into the darkness of the foyer, are all frequent reminders of the grace in past generations of residential architecture. Upstairs, the original hardwood floor is burnished and scarred, and downstairs, beautifully-carved designs in the door-frames and moldings remain, geometric shapes in white. The rooms are populated with brightly-reflecting French doors and a series of crumbling brick fireplaces, and in the yard stand three magnificent oaks withering with age.

The house is in a working-class neighborhood in Burlington, and it's admittedly not in anything but livable shape. Affordability was as much a factor as space. But where some would merely scoff at the peeling paint of the back stairs or the cracking, splintered porch-boards out front, or would roll their alarmed eyes at the corroded bathtub or the sloped warping linoleum of the kitchen floor, I find the same tarnished beauty I see in all of Burlington. This decayed manse suits me well, at least for now, until we inevitably flee to the solitude of the woods again someday, having tired of 'city' life downtown. For now, we've made this place our own, a rickety battlement against the rising tide of sprawl around the state. By clinging to our history and tenderly caring for it, we preserve it it alive and whole. 

"Ever since I have been so involved

In loving the feeling of keeping a small house warm and clean,

I'm not always aware that there are stars above stars

Just above that ceiling.

Or that the rain gushing throws the trash into the street,

Or that the wind in dark parking lots, at this moment,

Holds a leaf to the fence.

I sort of remember the world, but my small house is glowing.

A car playing music drives past the window

While I'm washing dishes in the vast night."

                                              -Mount Eerie, "Small House"

An X On A Photograph

In forgotten days you were suspended in the air,

a haze in the void that moved like waves of thick glass.

Between yawning pines you hovered, curse-like,

a portent unremarked on but witnessed

in side-cast glances and anxious shuffles homeward.

There was a gravitational pull to your freeward float,

unable to lift skyward, like a spectre trapped in a room.

Disembodied but present, glimpsed in reaching shadow,

you were conjured at a remove, in those held breaths

between telephone calls, in the static throb and burn

between lost frequencies on endless drives to outskirts.

You were in the streets like electrical fire,

all negative space and a careful grave,

tended like a frozen pond or barren field,

a safe distance torn apart by blank forces.

In The Missing Hours Of An Absent Spring...

Spring has fled from us here in Burlington, or more accurately, spring was never here to begin with. The season's simply missing from our collective experience of 2013, a blacked-out section of a classified report or an abductee's period of missing, haunted time. Winter's raw chill dissolved in a single medium-length fade into the sticky, sweltering fragrance of summer sprung early, of the lingering traces of last night's cookouts on the tepid breeze, of barely-open windows in old houses and the green, bursting fervor of plant life growing wildly. Here in Burlington, the air grows heavy and languid, a solid object to swim through, bleeding into the car like a flood while you're helplessly marooned in city traffic. The heat shimmers in its wave-like, electric haze from the power stations and the tarmac highway surfaces, lends a dream-lit quality to those void-like spaces behind the abandoned, collapsing mills, the littered vacant lots. I expect that in a similar blink, all of this will be entombed in gray autumn once more, but for now we watch the reflections of lights dance across our watermarked ceilings and try to stay cool. Half of town seems to be on vacation already, a mass evacuation though it's only May.

Last night, I took a long walk with a friend who's recent personal crises greatly required the company. He lives in Graham, the smaller but much more affluent neighboring city to Burlington and a shadow image of what this place might've been, had different choices been made. As I paced in the liquid heat through sturdy brick-ranch neighborhoods, past neatly-trimmed lawns, I realized how very distant Graham seemed from Burlington, more in a matter of stark degrees than the sum of the very few miles between them. Burlington is still unlike anywhere else I've ever been. The closest approximation I can consider, strangely, is Los Angeles. While the two cities of course couldn't be more different than, well, winter and summer, only in LA have I also felt that surreal, edge-of-the-world quality found in such abundance in central Alamance County. The difference is here, we're on the edge of nothing. We're simply quarantined, isolated. To paraphrase Jeffrey Eugenides, we're mapped by what surrounds us. The rest of the Triangle and the Triad both seem like far-off stars glimpsed from the cold surface of a dying planet. As I've said before (in interviews for the band mostly), the surface of Burlington is a thin shell covering something stranger and much more elemental beneath, a mood that's been described by some of my visiting friends as "Lynchian". You'll turn a corner here and know you've crossed that border, that threshold, and I've realized that this 'Other Burlington' has informed so much of my musical and film work that it's becoming a defining aspect of my experiences here. Denny, escaping into the placid environs of Chapel Hill for work each day, is less acclimated to Burlington's quaintly unusual atmosphere. This is a 'thin place' in every sense of the word. Sometimes you can see behind the veil here, and sometimes it's only the faintest negative glimpsed, a double exposure in warped glass.

In summer, the furious eruption of green in this city, with its cornucopia of oaks and maples, tends to hide what seems more evident in the frozen months, with the trees black and bare and the grass dead in the lots behind the railroad rights of way and in the yards of the boarded-up Victorian mansions. But one glance at the history of this place, from the heyday of the Burlington Coffin Company, to the bizarre goings-on in the monster-cursed myths of Goat Island, to the serial killer Blanche Taylor Moore and her sweet, subtle poisonings, and it's readily apparent that things are a bit different here. There's multiple levels of perception to Burlington, all of them unusual. One can miss the subtleties, or choose to overlook them in the name of more logical rationale, but you can't deny that the mood here is odd, to say the least. Underneath Burlington's mask of an ordinary Southern town are the deepest fathoms.

So, am I simply investing something unique where only another dying North Carolina mill town exists, as would be expected of any artistic nature? I don't think so. Simply, nowhere else I've known has precisely felt like this, and in a way, that's why Burlington has come to feel so much like home even in just the two busy years we've spent here. You see, I've always been the caretaker. I've been here for years, without knowing it. It existed as a shade in my mind that had yet to be lifted, and I was always fated to come here. My music's destiny, my own destiny, lies within the eerie borders of this forgotten little city. I am sure unlocking its myriad secrets will prove fascinating all throughout the years to come.

We Dream In Our Waking Moments, And Walk In Our Sleep

Lately I've been re-reading 'The Scarlet Letter', that hated bane of so many teenaged American existences, for the first time in about a decade. As always, Hawthorne's work manages to both haunt and intrigue in equal measure. Imminently drier than my favorite works of old Nathaniel, 'The Scarlet Letter' still incandescently smolders with the delirium of its prose, a heady brew of paranoia, shameful secrets, and fear.

It's the terror that most lingers in my continuing fascination with the early settlers of Massachusetts. One can imagine how foreboding such a land must have seemed to them, those severe British cultists in their pitch-black clothes and dour expressions. The America of the age was an endless carpet of dark, unknowable forests and steeply climbing hillsides. As man is known to do, the Puritans set at once to creating their own demons when confronted with the void. Man must explain, to put into a frame of reference, what cannot be understood. There, balanced on an edge of this new, depthless oblivion, setting foot into a world utterly unknown, they populated those woods with demons and witches. It was either a precarious attempt to better understand their mysteries, or a realization that the truth of all that unknown land was much darker, indeed. They were so far from home, and behind their backs teemed a multitude of open-ended questions.

In such tense, unusual situations, men tend to turn on each other. Suspicion, conspiracy, and hidden lives are cast like shadows behind the chalk-white facade of every early settler. In 'The Scarlet Letter', every finger that points in Hester Prynne's direction is stained with the blood of its own sin. Only Hester's quarantine allows her to see this clearly, as one accursed, excluded. Freed from the bindings of a severely unhealthy repression, she sees behind the veil. America is a loss of innocence, a confrontation with the animal nature of our environs. The Puritans' growing pains were a part of becoming the first Americans. Their behaviors and reactions would shape what that word would later mean. We've all seen how such legacies resonate through the decades towards today.

I grew up shaded by dark and eerie hills in the western half of Massachusetts, but it's somehow still North Carolina that is conjured by re-reading these florid colonial works. Our state's first settlers disappeared without any trace, and it's as if they're still lingering here between the hazy pines, hovering aloft in the tall grasses of the fields. Hundreds of vanished families like ghosts drifting about in whispers, shadowing every step. This state is shrouded in its past in a way so unique, so peculiar, that I haven't yet seen its double elsewhere. For every Costco, every new lakeside McMansion development, every strip of blank-faced office buildings or desolate fast-food parking lots, you're still just moments away from a bottomless frontier. Just last week, ten minutes from home, Denny and I camped alone at Shallow Ford entirely surrounded by the abyss. Hundreds of years and nothing has changed. America is still a mystery, a void beyond a void, a thin fabric behind a carefully-constructed surface. America is still just a murky sea of trees and hills, masking spirits and devils and wretches casting spells much as it did in the early days. We've managed to put a mask on it, but we're all still huddled close against the campfire light, jumping nervously at every rustling noise deep within the forest.