8 Fragments For Kurt Cobain

1:
Genius is not a generous thing.
In return it charges more interest than any amount of royalties can cover.
And it resents fame with bitter vengeance.
Pills and powders only placate it awhile.
Then it puts you in a place where
the planet's poles reverse.
Where the currents of electricity shift
Your body becomes a magnet and pulls to it
despair and rotten teeth, Cheese whiz and guns, whose
triggers are shaped tenderly into a false lust
in timeless illusion.

2:
The guitar claws kept tightening, I guess on your heart stem.
The loops of feedback and distortion, threaded right thru Lucifer's wisdom teeth, and never
stopped their reverberating in your mind.
And from the stage all the faces out front seemed so hungry with an unbearably wholesome misunderstanding.
From where they sat, you seemed so far up there, high and live and diving.
And instead you were swamp crawling,
down, deeper, until you tasted the Earth's own blood,
and chatted with the Buzzing-eyed insects
that heroin breeds.

3:
You should have talked more with the monkey.
He's always willing to negotiate.
I'm still paying him off...
The greater the money and fame, the slower the pendulum of fortune swings.
Your will could have sped it up...
But you left that in a plane, because it wouldn't pass customs and immigration.

4:
Here's synchronicity for you: your music's tape was inside my walkman, when my best friend from summer camp called with the news about you.
I listened them... It was all there!
Your music kept cutting deeper and deeper
valleys of sound, less and less light, until
you hit solid rock.
The drill bit broke and the valley became a thin crevice, impassible in time, as time itself stopped.
And the walls became cages of brilliant notes
pressing in... pressure.
That's how diamonds are made.
And that's where it sometimes all collapses down in on you.

5:
Then I translated your muttered lyrics,
and the phrases were curious: like
"incognito libido" and "Chalk Skin Bending".
The words kept getting smaller and smaller until separated from their music.
Each letter spilled out into a cartridge which fit only in the barrel of a gun.

6:
And you shoved the barrel in as far as possible, because that's where the pain came from.
That's where the demons were digging.
The world outside was blank.
Its every cause was just a continuation of another unsolved effect.

7:
But Kurt... Didn't the thought that you would never
write another song, another feverish line
or riff make you think twice?
That's what I don't understand.
Because it's kept me
alive, above any wounds.

8:
If only you hadn't swallowed yourself into a coma in Roma...
You could have gone to Florence and looked into the eyes of Bellinni or Rafael's Portraits.
Perhaps inside them you could have found a threshold back to beauty's arms, where it all began...
No matter that you felt betrayed by her.
That is always the cost, as Frank said, of a young artist's remorseless passion, which starts out as a kiss, and follows like a curse.