A POEM BY JASON LABBE



          Basement Tapes


          We descended into the glow
                                              of Christmas lights,
                     into humidity & sheer volume.

          Feedback & the snare’s crack
          repelled imposters         & broke the spell
          of drunken fathers         & morning bells.

          Bodies shook into
                                 the shape of a body raised
          on fashionable manifestos

          not meant to decode. Our abstract tattoos
          deemed old-style self destruction
                                              (pills & needles)

          a disproved & dated
          strike against
                                              the daylight economy.

          We bragged of smashing select windows.
          We were out to prove
          you could go to school & still refuse
                                   the future with xerox vision:

          kitschy clip art
          of domestic scenarios & blown-up

                                  industrial schematics:
          graphics for show posters
          we stuck up strategically.

          Handbills proclaimed six bands back-to-back

          A Call to Action!

          Jet-black & bone-white,
                                               cut & paste
          was our exacto-fashion.

          A few tattered flyers & grainy
                                              black & white blurs
          are the only proof to back up the lore
          of a scene
          & sound—
          neither new-wave nor second-wave,
                                  never no-wave,
          maybe the last wave…

                                  You had to be there…

          Approaching dawn it wasn’t light
                                             we feared,
          but exposure.

          A summer of sets—of sweat—
                                              lost to tinnitus,
          overwhelmed with static,
          recorded live to a stereo deck & copied
                                  onto cheap cassettes—

          coveted dubs distort
          before
                                  they wear out & break.



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Jason Labbe has poems appearing or forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, CROWD, Barrow Street, Absent, Indiana Review, and the 2008 Outside Voices Anthology of Younger Poets, among other venues. Visit him at www.studyinblue.com.


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