week 10: hanif abdurraqib
installation 2: "When We Were 13, Jeff’s Father Left The Needle Down On A Journey Record Before Leaving The House One Morning And Never Coming Back"
and this is why none of us sing along to “Don’t Stop Believin’” when we are being driven by Jeff’s mom, four boys packed in the backseat tight like the tobacco in them cigarettes Jeff’s mom got riding
shotgun with us around I-270 in a powder blue Ford Taurus where four years later Jeff will lose his virginity to a girl behind the East High School football field then later that night his keys and pants in the school pool so that he has to run
home crying to his mother with an oversized shirt and no pants, like a cartoon bear, and the next day when I hear this story, I will think about what it means for someone to become naked two times in one night to rush into the warmth of two
women, once becoming a man and once becoming a boy all over again but right now it is just us in this car with Jeff’s mother, that cigarette smoke dancing from her lips until it catches the breeze
from the cracked front window and glides back towards us a vagabond, searching for a throat to move into and cripple while Neal Schon’s guitar rides out the speakers and I don’t know how many open windows a man has to climb out of in the middle of the night in order to have hands that can make anything scream like that.
nothing knows the sound of abandonment like a highway does, not even God.
in the 1980’s, everyone wrote songs about someone leaving except for this one cuz it’s about how the morning explodes over two people in one bed who didn’t know each other the night before when alone
was the only other option and their homes had too many mirrors for all that shit and so it is possible that this is the only song written in the 1980’s about how fear turns into promise
I think I know this because there is so much piano spilling
all over our laps that we can’t help but to smile since we still black and know nothing can ransack sorrow like a piano.
(Read the rest of the poem here. Listen to "Don't Stop Believin'" here.)
A boy, sardined between being thirteen and death in the backseat of a car, tells a story to the camera. A camera to his left, a different story. A camera to his right, another one. Cigarette smoke interrupting it all. All the while, strangers waitin’ up and down the boulevard / Their shadows searchin’ in the night…
Quintessential Abdurraqib: culture slices poetry. This is a piece that, once again, curates an experience for the reader, almost replicating his music criticism. The scene is set, the table is decorated, your mouth an ashtray waiting to be filled. There is an innate cinematography to the way Abdurraqib composes his work; the use of the phrase “left the needle down” in the title sets up the literal needle drop in the first lines of the poem. We gaze in through the camera’s lens and a wall is shot down. The speaker tells a story. The music starts. Abdurraqib is the puppeteer outside the box, whilst being a puppet himself.
Growing up is something of a stream of consciousness. There is a stumble in trying to reconcile the image of who you once were with who you see in the mirror. Often, we struggle with dissecting the precisions of an experience that contributed to the tangle of nerves and synapses that corrupts the former image. A stream of consciousness is a breakdown, the climax of the song accompanied with a flurry of images, ending on the speaker’s dilated pupil. A friend’s absent dad and your dead mom meet at the car’s destination; the needle drops. The musics pinches out, “nothing knows the sound of abandonment like a highway does, not even God.”
In my experience, humans are deeply emotional creatures who are nudged into reason. Our bodies were made to parcel certain feelings to revisit with a trigger. The olfactory senses can send you through time when you return to a childhood favorite recipe, the sensation of the knife slicing through to the cutting board pulling at your nerve ends. Sounds, too, sleep under the skin. Bruce Springsteen’s “The River” leaves me clutching at my throat time and again when Spotify Shuffle wills it (read Abdurraqib’s phenomenal recount of The River Tour here).
“This is why none of us sing along.”
“Nothing can ransack sorrow like a piano.”
“Play me something, child.”
We are frozen in that moment between one note and the next. A brief breath, recluse. Until the melody pours back in, filling the car like a bloodbath, and we are forced to live once more.