Diaspora Largo

This is a remastered version of my 2003 album 13th Idiot Blessed.

During the years I taught 7th and 8th graders I read thousands of their essays, quite a few of which dealt with one form of adolescent trauma or another. Spending so much of my life with young kids brought back memories from my own youth which brought to mind many specific locations and experiences from my hometown: the lakes, the river, the factories, certain parks, my church and schools, and of course the varied traumas and ecstasies of any adolescence. The connections only seem clear in retrospect, but at the time it was all intuition.

Pink Flower (4:09) Nomalte (2:44)
Blind Bird (with Phil Calvert) (7:52) Junta's Yoga Cult Dilemma (3:40)
A Dog's Moon (2:52) Raven (7:02)
13th Idiot Blessed (5:49)
The Window in the Ground (with Phil Calvert)
Jerald (2:42)
Diaspora Largo (2:39)
Cloud Above the Lake (2:48)
At Hooker Docks (4:15)
Tubby (2:20)

Except where specifically noted below, all tracks were composed, performed, and produced by Frederick Moore.

Completed in 2003

Misere on Father’s Day,
Michelle! It was then that you joined us in the train yard
near North and Lockport.
A fragment of soul, adrift,
From your concealed throat came your favorite torch song:
Faceless one! Keep faith with me.

As I would a faun,
Forlorn and with a broken back,
I pitied you, but poked at you,
Dissecting you,
While holding you flat against the wall.
Into your hidden mouth,
The hypodermic kiss of a stranger
made space for you (you faceless one).

Though in time you recovered,
A hole had been ripped through you,
Through which you displayed your soul
and lifted your skirt.
Your bare legs exposed
For passersby and rivals
Who’d slash each other’s skin
For a chance to warm their hands.
Now faithless one, keep face with me!

Obscured by shadows and clouds,
My question marks subside and dissolve into all
that I’ll never know about you.
The lies I’ve told and the lies I’ve tried to believe,
The things I’ve known but have never seen,
My own will melting into your liquid, warm, pink flower.
With held breath and closed eyes,
I’m pulled into your firm, vindictive grip,
As you hum to me the songs you learned
while you were hidden away.
Their tunes of harsh and foreign strain
Sear my raw combusting skin.
You Faithless One, keep faith with me!

Goodbye Michelle,
Have a good year.

Phil Calvert, Guitar Solos
Frederick Moore, Voices & Piano
Jeff Miley, Guitar
Doug Shreeve, Bass
Eric Wells, Drums
Produced by Phil Calvert & Frederick Moore

Beyond the highway,
Behind the old lost river road,
There was a dry place,
Where we could close our eyes to the world.
Broken glass on burning grass,
Soft flame to burn the briars away.
Wasted land where dead trees stand,
Sand papered walls grow soft in decay.
There’s a blind bird in a cloud above the lake;
And the world turns,
Pulling the blind bird down.

Frozen shame, dissolved in rain
Refined in sane, sad order betrayed.
Rusted pain confined in chains–
Red stains that line the sides of the cave.
There’s a wrong turn from the road that skirts the bay.
Where the wind burns,
And we close our eyes to the world.
There’s a blind bird in a cloud above the lake;
And the world turns,
Pulling the blind bird down.

In the picture she keeps in her bedroom, his mother appears to him surprisingly attractive. The openness of a twenty year old smile always seems to invite whatever will come its way, and hers is no different in this respect. But this is long before his time, before she has come to embrace her many discontents. At night she mourns her happy days as only the wasted diasporant can mourn.
For his own part he has come to accept these men who come into her world long enough to learn his name, as he learns theirs. With them he shares a six month lease, and the frozen dinners they prepare each night, but really little more. He has known some girls, but he’s been confused by his own static, and by theirs! In some he can sense a lost island; In others he can feel a warm stream. But ironically, with these it has been especially hard. At school there is a girl who is studious and quiet and kind, but when he speaks to her he feels as if it is in a code that she will never comprehend. There is a place he would like to show her that for her remains inaccessible.
One night as he watches his mother watch TV he tries to find the way she would like him to see her. It takes time, patience and concentration, but in time for a long moment it’s really there.

Frozen shame, dissolved in rain–
Red stains that line the sides of the cave.
Wasted land where dead trees stand;
Sand papered walls grow soft in decay.
There’s a blind bird in a cloud above the lake;
And the world turns,
Pulling the blind bird down

When I was a Catholic school kid I sometimes found it genuinely hard to believe that most of my classmates actually accepted the vindictive religious teachings we were expected to swallow. That said, there were some very nice and sincere kids who did so but were far too often betrayed in one way or another by the adults who were entrusted with their development, fear and shame being the primary instructional strategies. This piece concerns itself with such true believers who deserved better than they received and who hopefully found their way to something better.

A DOG’s MOON

I can still remember what the boys were told,
That you fell from something that you could not hold,
A hand you would not hold that could not hold you.
Sometimes, I still can see you in your favorite pose,
Like a blue baton against the wall that we could hold,
You'd laugh and smile slowly as if it were new.
Stay awake until midnight Mary,
We can take a train that will carry you and me to something better.
Find a way to Whirlpool and Ferry,
Say hello to you and me as we make it right tonight now Mary.

I won't soon forget you at the Wailing Wall,
Where you were caught surprised and that was when you fell,
And when you let go, I let go too.
In my mind I still hear the hollow sound of your pained hum,
A symphony of longing hope and baby sounds,
That came as you fell done, and I fell on you.
Say goodbye to all of that Mary,
Say hello to you and me as we wash our sins away now Mary.
Give a vote of confidence Baby,
Say a prayer to stay with me Mary.
Stay awake till midnight Mary.

It's a dog's moon
And there just isn't enough here
To go around for two discrete happy endings.

Low within the teeming tide,
Small static from the other side,
Fully formed without design,
A universe confined,
Was pulled like string into her shrouded
Head in finite clarity,
The Moby of her darkened sea
Secured, but loosely bound.

Raven fell without a sound,
Her wings lie shatterd on the ground,
Surrounded by unguarded gates
Unlocked, then opened wide.
Friction laced with fantasy
Will pull its dark cloud over me
With kinks and pangs to comfort me
Upon the ice I’ll be.

Focused eyes of beaming brides,
in solemn lies, their truth subsiding,
Exhalations from the floor,
Their words defining us as images,
Of finite clarity,
And fingers wrapped around the keys,
That work their way into the living door
That lives inside.

Raven fell without a sound,
Her wings lie scattered on the ground,
And though we sift through mute debris
The black box can’t be found.
Friction laced with fantasy
Will pour their dark dirt over me,
A falcon in the sacristy
Upon her (ice) I’ll be.

Twenty years ago, long before family separations at the border and the whole MAGA mindset, you could already sense that something of the sort was growing. It has, in fact, always been with us.

Frederick Moore, Voices
Phil Calvert, Guitars
Doug Shreeve, Bass
Eric Wells, Drums
Produced by Phil Calvert & Frederick Moore

Deveaux had always been a quiet place
Where neighbors spoke from yard to lawn
And yawned the lazy months away,
The country club veranda
Like mimosas on a summer tray.

Speakers in the dark
Bombard the park with their waves,
A palpable sense of alarm.
Panic in the spark
That lights the darkness in rage.
A kind of people,
Who crawl from deep holes,
Inside the depot,
They think they’ve found a home.

Their eyes are large from lack of light
And their skin blends in with earth and stone.
Their voices hiss with poisoned wind.
This place can never be their home.
They eat the flowers from our gardens
And pull the sodded grass from our lawns.
Their children pee around our wooden benches
And they squat upon the open ground.

People in the park
Divine the marks on their faces,
And they’re all the same.
Fuel in the spark,
A leaking ark for the graceless.
A kind of people,
Who crawl from deep holes,
Inside the depot,
These are not people.

The people in the town are stirring, certain now,
The people in the town are certain, stirring now,
The people in the town are stirring, certain now,
To force the others down.
The people in the town are certain, stirring now,
The people in the town are stirring, certain now,
The people in the town are certain, stirring
Like the window in the ground.

Detailing oaths into the burning torches,
We hold the metal to the flames.
We hold our breath and hear the hiss of burning flesh
To find our focus in the pain.
We’ll wait until the evening song is over
And they dream about the tunes they sang.
With taser guns we’ll march them to the depot,
Into the wholes from which they sprang.

We are the people
Who’ve locked in deep holes
Another people.
We are those people!

Panic in the park
Bombards the darkness in waves.

In her dream Jerald is sitting in a rusted, metal wheelchair,
His legs covered by a heavy, knitted blanket.
They are on the rocky Lake Ontario beach
Where she and her family spent several summer vacations
when she was a young girl,
But in the dream it is clearly a late Autumn morning.
Given the rockiness of the beach
Gerald could not possibly have been wheeled there,
But it doesn't matter; it's a dream.
They are close enough to the water
That the black waves are crashing in on them,
And they are both cold,
And there is a steady drizzle pouring down.
As she protectively leans into him,
She can feel warm tears on his face,
But otherwise he projects nothing.
Overcome by an exquisite combination of tenderness and remorse,
She emits a series of deep and profoundly satisfying sobs.
"I'm sorry Jerald. I am so sorry."

Say a final prayer for Whirlpool and Ferry,
Wave a last goodbye to Michelle and Mary,
Fake a little shame with focus and daring,
Blot out the stain with penance and sarin.

Taste it in the salt that covers both our lips,
Feel it in the sweat, the gliding of our bodies,
See it in the shine that glistens on our skin,
Deep in the faults, the distant pull of grinding.

Hear it in a drone, the choral sound of sighing,
Rattle in the phone, a static sound of flying,
Floating in the foam, a thousand fish crying,
Pick up their bones, the world is through dying.

There’s a corpse scented flower
Floating soft in the wind,
And the carbon dust raindrops
Glaze the white of your skin.

You should have been home arranging the moonscapes
That still hang from the walls of your bedroom.
It’s hard to grasp it now,
But but another time it wouldn't have happened.
You just got there an hour too soon.

On a tree in a garden
Lived an orange made of sin.
And you ate it not knowing
All the storms you’d begin.

That dark little place made space for you.
Your bounding heart and your face
Glazed by the fleck of light
Spinning through the keyhole like a moon.
And like a baby, you sat there for a week.

You would float from wall to wall
Like a disembodied soul.

There was a fountain for drowning
The dreams and the sins of the bold.
You should have been cautious;
You should have been older.

They inoculate us with fear, sex, and TV
In these narcotized, tepid dreams.
These breezes please coverted skin,
But their averted eyes despond you.

Within your second heart, a picture strobes,
And with every pulse, encrypts its image into your skin.
Shadows obscured in blue, morph into your aching heart,
And the beautiful thing never stops.

As a new teacher I attended a conference where a former gang member discussed his imprisonment for the murder of a rival-gang member when he was fourteen years old, and that after all these years he had moved beyond being a person who could do such a thing. Here’s a different voice saying the same thing in a different way.

I can now understand that at times I was so caught up in my own stuff that I was unable to even comprehend what was going on with those people who would happen to be around me. And I did some things that I would never accept today. But here I am, and I know that on some level it is probably unjust that I am able to go on living as I do when I may have cost other people the very things that I now value. I don't really know how to address this except to say that I'm no longer like that, and I've come to see that it is today's lightning you try to avoid, not that which struck yesterday.