For those of you who haven’t heard me ramble on about my band The Brooklyn Players Reading Society, we’re a four-piece, experimental rock/blues band that blends spoken word and song.  My role as the lead singer isn’t just to sing but to also compose the words to our pieces, which is fun but can sometimes be quite difficult.  A few of our songs are straight-forward blues or rock numbers with a standard verse/chorus structure and easy, rhyming lyrics that weren’t too hard to write.  Most of our pieces, however, challenge the concept of a typical song and required some serious work on the composing and lyric-writing fronts.  To balance out this headiness, we’ve decided to mix up our set with some quick poetry breaks where I read a poem while the band improvises.  This is quite fun and truly captures the spirit of the band.  However, this meant I had to write some poems, which is certainly not my forte.  Before sitting down with a pen and paper, I decided to skim through my hard drive and polish up some old pieces from a poetry class back in grad school.  This one in particular still resonates with me; stay tuned for a demo recording filled with lovely sax sounds, strange drum rhythms, and eerie piano chords.

Two Deer Stake Out my Tree
A tree with limbs that cross and curve,
weave a basket seat for basket cases
to sit in and save the world.
Let’s share, we can make symmetry.
But muscular mama raises her hoof,
shows me her square of collagen and bone.
I will kick you in the head and
let my fawn eat your flesh
‘cause we don’t let the human bring us down.

In a bar under the Williamsburg bridge
packed with baby mamas, hoochie mamas
and your mama’s so big, I thrust out
my palms in response to a shove.
Wildcat sidekick pounces from behind,
collects my skin under her beauty parlor nails
growling with the wrath of woman done wrong
by a man she can’t let bring her down.