Kundiman

Kundiman*

by Angelo R. Lacuesta

after Li Duan’s Chou Yu
after “Mayonaise” by Smashing Pumpkins

His guitar is gutted
With a wounded string,
A G repurposed into D,
Thus a little loosely strung

Like lonely gangs on rum
That run the streets of her town
With nothing but time to swing
The overpracticed strum,

The serenade sung by men,
Smoothened in the hollow chests
And in the arch of mouths made round
But for his sound,

Gut for wound steel, the chorus stung
And swollen into a broken song,
She notes his tongue
And he, the echo of her ear, plucked

Behind the curved wrought iron railing,
Expecting, expecting, expecting.

*serenade

Sarge Lacuesta Guests at Junkyard of Circumstance

Postscript to Mouths

with paraphrase and passages from T.S. Eliot, John Coltrane, Leonard Cohen and Nina Simone

“Silence is a mouth.”
- Mookie Katigbak

“Qui cantat, bis orat” (To sing once is to pray twice.)
- St. Agustine


Make it so. Make it so. But make mine the saxophone, mine the trumpet, bright, dark, round, flat, sharp, wan, mine unmated, a groan and a drone, a whine, filled with the sound I draw on, the things I write, the things that make me great. Be it so. Begrudge the ostinato. It’s music you know? You can’t teach it And those who think they can, can only by following the line written same-o, same-o, acting to the insipid tone, toeing the inspired line. But we know songs only by the singing. We know a key only by emotions it opens. A recording from 1970. A revival from 1980. Jazz taught you, Disco taught me: this—repetition is not reiteration but an iteration. And if this inversion is my broken root, crimped on a keyboard, fixed like tablature—then I shall invert everything and reverse everything. And curse every minute of irreversible decision. Do I move you? The answer better be yes, yes, down to your liver. Then make mine the organ. Mine the microphone. Make mine the megaphone. Begrudge me the ostinato. Make mine the obligato. They say, play it back and we open our hard cases, we spread our pages, surrender our passages. Oh do not ask ‘what is it?’ Don’t be psychic, or you’ll blow it. Here, my voice, held in two hands, cupped to my mouth, my microphone, my mellotron, my theremin, my cathedral organ. The holy and the broken hallelujah. It’s music, you know? You can’t touch it, nor put rest, nor bring break, nor cause caesura. Made in free, unreal times, from open mouths, from broken homes, from hissing worms, the apocalyptic, cracked cornet. The broken king composing hallelujah. A song is notation for a mouth, no mouth is born without a song, no key, no tone, no form, no song. Acknowledgement. Resolution. Pursuance. Psalm. Song, poem, man, dust.