Overview
Music and writing are essential parts of who I am. My creative endeavours have oscillated between the two for most of my life: I wrote little stories when I was little boy; I took up guitar as a teenager, writing and performing songs in the years since; I refocused on writing fiction as an adult, eventually writing my Master’s thesis on connecting popular music with contemporary literary fiction.
This creative writing project—an idea I’ve been nurturing since at least 2017—was born of a related line of thinking: to turn music I love into a series of connected poems that could also be read and enjoyed individually.
As a whole, the poems comprise a creative-critical project that covers my favourite albums of the decade, in an end-of-decade countdown you might expect to see in Rolling Stone Magazine or a similar publication that reviews music. Each poem is associated with an album released during the 2010’s, capturing the album as a scene depicting one or more of its themes.
The collection of poems is intended to be a Dantesque journey – there’s even a guide just like Virgil, – where the narrator “travels” through each scene progressively until the end, my top album of the decade. Each poem is mostly a personal reflection, but is also partly critical review of the album for which it is named.
The composition of each poem is sort of three-fold: repurposed lyrics and other content from the albums themselves (similar to the poems of “Ern Malley” being crafted from existing sources), lines reworked from Dante’s Divine Comedy, and my own reflections on each album capturing how they make me feel and why they are important to me.
If you’re more interested in the music list than the poems, you can skip to the full list of my 100 favourite albums of the 2010s by clicking here (you can also click through to see this list at the end of the poems).
20. Beach House // Bloom (2012)
Blinking stars dance
off one another
on the dusk sky’s canvas.
Our little boat,
rocking side to side
on the ocean’s currents
along its path, finding itself in a new
direction,
carries Rael and me
to renewed life,
one that rises above
the shattered perfect surface
from where we’ve been.
Now we have balance:
our little boat drifts above
a perfect mirror bottom,
reflecting the auspices
that the divine night sky gifts us.
The canyon in the distance,
residing amongst smoggy haze,
calls to us. Arrows falling
from the moon land
and float
on the water ahead, guiding
Rael as he rows
us toward the canyon.
As he does,
my eyes, my heart,
and my shivering skin leave their vessel,
feeling the vastness
of emptiness surrounding us,
drawn by its call
stronger than the sirens:
with its rejection of time
with its withdrawal from space
with its offer
of silent enlightenment.
The canyon feels farther
the closer we draw,
the nothingness
and the shimmering sky
drinking my soul
and swallowing me in.
Emptiness has no taste or smell,
it is merely a hairless heart
being towed away
in a rusted prison wagon
on a floating platform.
Our craft a crumbling cradle,
is rocked by choppy waves,
the language of the anxious waters
upon which we ride.
A bright spark in the sky
over the dark waters
and I am emptied
of the void:
the nothingness returns my eyes, my heart,
and my tightened skin—
pouring into my lungs,
full and overspilling.
This vessel passes
into the entrance of the canyon,
out on the open sea
cleansed and forgiven,
bearing down the gap
with only a moment left.
19. Mitski // Be The Cowboy (2018)
A cursory glance:
Rael steers me
down a long corridor
of creepy still water,
some sort of haunted house-boat ride.
But then the stream ahead
is illuminated in staggered fashion
as bright candles flicker
on both sides of the corridor walls.
As Rael rows our vessel
the candles reveal paintings
framed,
in immaculate condition,
blaring from the wall—
colourful vignettes demanding attention
during the brief window we can see them
—during which we can consume them—
as we waft past on the water.
A masque performer
wearing Colombina,
a different colour for every painting,
somehow moves inside of each artwork,
committed to capture
the essence of each role
that is demanded of her
by the story of each picture.
In the first,
a geyser spews foamy hot water,
bubbling over from below,
and I can hear it calling to me
constantly:
it rises from the earth
of an overcast beach
as the masked performer runs
toward it,
the foamy water
coaxing her to come closer.
A myth of perfection,
her mask begins to crack
as she draws near the geyser’s steam,
but her feet dig into the sand
pressing forward into the vapour
brave to be vulnerable,
to reveal the underneath.
The geyser bellows a loud tune,
pulsating in unmistakable musical rhythm
to a structure unexpected.
I can hear the harmony
only when it’s harming me,
as we glide past the painting—
the Colombina mask cracked
yet remains intact,
the performer leaps onto the earth’s vent
tapping into power
stretched down from the heavens
to sink into the ground,
excavating the soil
to reveal only an identical mask:
protected and long-lived by the dirt,
cracked along the very same seams,
staring back at the performer.
18. Sleater-Kinney // No Cities to Love (2015)
Three cavalry storm
the rusted patriarchal gate,
ten years out of the homestead,
but none of them spent on the road.
With clenched fists, the riders
disarm the gatekeepers,
coming to check the damage,
to the cracks on the surface,
summoned by the trampling horses;
they arch their backs and bellow,
spooking the first wave of gatekeepers,
now taking refuge in the hoof-flattened bushes
flanking the fences.
The cavalry disarm the next wave of guards,
spitting a corrosive venom
that eats their armour
and decomposes the guards before my eyes,
or disarms them if they survive
A third wave, clad in golden suits
adorned in hand-carved minotaurs
brandishing crimson-tipped chrome tridents—
they shine in the light
piercing through the clouds.
A war cry from the cavalry:
“We win; we lose;
only together do we break through.”
As the cavalry charge at the golden guards,
as the guards lift their spears to their eyes,
as the shredded clouds break in the day,
the cavalry raise up their chests,
reflecting the light, beating it into submission,
refracting its target as a weapon.
The light bounces off the cavalry breastplates
and beams at a thousand degrees of added heat
back at the hardening guard.
They shriek
for only
a moment
as the defected light
burns them
melting them
into the mud.
The cavalry storms
past Rael and me
our jaws agape
at the precision
of their unleashed fury,
and barge down the wooden double doors
of the palatial homestead
to tread on land
truly equal,
to stomp out the spineless
and the morally feeble.
Away from the muddy demesne Rael whisks me,
thoughtful of our journey and present danger;
beyond my shoulder
I glance to see a city cast
in raucous flame.
17. Big Thief // U.F.O.F (2019)
I’ve always had my head
high up in the clouds,
it was only a matter of time
before I couldn’t see back down.
Reaching beyond
my own means—
ambition without
a soft return—
I build an ascending platform,
a staircase of words
way up into the sky;
but these resources of inspiration
are finite,
and
the fall
back down to earth
imminent.
The platform floats
on iridescent clouds
threaded together
by a strange alien presence
existing somewhere above
with uneasy wonder;
but the mind polarises itself
as its rivers run dry
of words to commit,
and the ones that came before
buckle and shatter
then disappear like a bad dream.
In freefall
cold dams are built in the mind
blocking out water
so clear and bright,
the author’s path forward:
roiled and out of sight—
nothing comes
but the burgeoning sensation
of suffocation
from more nothing to come.
With the shaggy-haired Rael
is a buzz cut troubadour
powering the cloud
that they ride upon
and a hypnotic guitar
finger picked into forever,
and a bewitched voice,
warping
to the needs of the trappings of songs
espousing wisdom of life
from a warm whisper.
They bind all that is living
and has ever lived
together
at the cellular level.
Like when the head touches the pillow
after a full day of being swarmed
The cloud softens my landing.
I’m cocooned by the silk of the cloud,
and though it seems dazed by its own beauty
and is bordered by darker demons
it turns the pages for me
so that I may fill in the blank ones,
for it seems so free,
floating as both dreamer and dream.
16. Father John Misty // I Love You, Honeybear (2015)
The wooden saloon doors swing open:
a new troubadour bursts inside,
brushes past Rael,
in pressed jacket
and shirt unbuttoned.
His handsome face obscured
by his thick dark beard,
and his cocksure strut,
more evidently erudite
than any words need prove.
The oak bar his destination,
beyond tables lathered in smoke and cooked chicken.
From across the room
the bearded troubadour calls out
a thirsty crow sat at the bar,
who is scowling his eye
at women,
without taste.
The troubadour’s voice
a sweet seductive breeze
coming down from
the face of a mountain
in the midst of a heatwave.
But his words to the man
are anything but
a cool gust:
a nonchalant jab from the ego
coated in poisoned liqueur,
rejected by the bar patron—
accusations of him being a rake.
I barely know
how long a moment lasts,
but within one
the two bearded bohemians
are in a scrap:
the troubadour clutching the collar
of the other man
with one hand
and smashing a small nation of meaningless objects
living on the bar-top
across the rake’s skull.
The fight takes to the floor
and Rael points to a woman in the doorway,
wearing a wedding dress
someone was probably murdered in,
who could walk all over either of the men
like a god damn marching band.
She frowns watching the pair
roll around on the ground
while the sheets draping the saloon tables
get coated in beer and blood
like a Rorschach inkblot;
other patrons
more horrified at spilling their drinks
than at being hurt,
back away from the tussle.
The troubadour is victorious
in emerging to his feet first
(if that counts as victory)
and buries the rake
under the stools and chairs
within his reach.
The troubadour greets the woman,
still standing in the door:
“My love, you’re the one
I wanna watch the ship go down with.”
The pair try shuffling through contraband
toward the bar,
but a crowd forms
like a scab around the wound
to marvel at the mess:
the troubadour binges on the attention,
and calls them half-wits of distinction,
until he realises they’re laughing at him.
Then, the rake,
the floor’s honourable chair-man,
emerges from the rubble
and dives at the troubadour—
the pair roll around
like another cartoon brawl,
both men looking more and more identical.
Rael and I make for the lattice batwing doors,
the last of the smokes and chicken left behind,
and as we put distance between the saloon and us
the sounds of drunken punches landing
on swollen skin
fade.
15. Arcade Fire // The Suburbs (2010)
Never again the simplicity
of the suburb’s eye.
Never again the shine of it
in my woods:
I move my feet from hot pavement:
forward moving
yet facing backwards.
Rael splashes a pale of water
at my feet
to a moment’s relief.
A steam rises to my face.
When it dissipates, a red flag appears
on a front lawn before me;
on the opposite shore behind me, a brick house
with a blue flag
planted in its yard.
The red flagged house is crumbling
but as each brick
falls, faceless builders
replace them with grey cinder blocks.
In the front window, a boy
is planted in front of a cathode-ray tube
like an orchid in a pebbled garden,
his sight fixed like a laser beam
the artificial lights and colours
flooding the crescents and valleys
lining his face.
I creep closer to the house, and Rael casts
warnings that fly past my ear
from the middle of the blank street.
Flaky paint chips stick to my hand
the moment it meets the window sill.
I tilt my head closer to the glass
to see the familiar looking boy
but only see myself more clearly,
the glass reflecting back to me
like a one-way mirror, where a something
I once knew is on the other side,
a feeling I’ve long since moved past,
can no longer access
can no longer recreate.
A ground-quaking metallic sound erupts
from the opposite shore of the street:
as the builders pile up the blocks,
the blue flagged house bombards the red
with explosive projectiles.
The brown bricked house shakes under the impact
like a plate of jelly quivering
when the fridge door is pulled open;
but the little boy stays
cross-eyed and painless
fixated on the screen.
The hits keep coming.
Rael curses at me to back away from the house,
that I’m done living in the shadows of your sun,
that we’ll never survive
if we don’t move.
The storm continues to hail upon the red house
—but I back away
and Rael drags me to
the safety of the street.
I can’t see
the child in the house
and I’ve always resisted
believing that he was in there
but now I’m ready to start.
14. Fleet Foxes // Crack-Up (2017)
Light ended the night,
but the song remained:
the raft carrying Rael and me
awakens us with a gentle clapping against
sharp and smoke-coloured rocks
while the water just winds by us,
colliding and bouncing back
—as bison headbutt one another—
before receding to join the rest of the ocean.
It seems longer than the six rotations
it took to crash,
but it’s true
we’ve gone far to find here.
I gaze upon the thicket of jungle
lining the rocky coast
against which our vessel rests—
it’s dense, too dense
to see through,
as if trying to peer through the air
when cinder and smoke hang upon it.
I could swear I’ve been on this island
twice before,
but the harmonies it served,
flush against the mountainside
that is hidden by the thicket
like a fleet of angels
emanating directly into my spirit,
are subject to a coup of quiet interludes
of tonal dissonance—
difficult to navigate and traverse
but bountiful in receipt.
Rael and I venture onto the shoreline
and as repulsive as the thicket tries to be
there is a delight in pressing forward,
like the freshness of flowers
chasing after the wind
in the infancy of warm bloom.
The shore’s vanguard
of forestry is complex and thick,
shrouded in moss and ivy,
and walking through
reveals more of the same world
and that it is a fool’s errand
to have expected it to change
when a sign
carved long ago in ivory
comes to mind.
We tussle with the jungle
for hours, doing our best
not to crack like china plates
or to turn our eyes into the ivies.
It was wrong to think
the smoke wouldn’t enfold us
that someone would be waiting
off in the distance for us.
Before my sight recedes
and my will concedes
to let the thicket envelop me forever,
to become a child to the ivy,
Rael spies a fleet angel
hovering over us—
He reaches out
to the figure of light,
and I follow suit,
holding fast to the wing.
At first my eyes
could not support the sight;
as lightning strikes
so does the fleet angel stun my gaze.
The figure blasts a beam of light below
lifting us from the ground,
and puts us in a bright clearing
on the island of our captivity:
if only every way sign we cling to,
if only they could be so.
The fleet angel disappears from our sight
but the remnants of its light
shine on a small vessel
complete and intact
bobbing on calmer waters
than those on which we arrived:
biding our time
making our way forward
on another ocean
steered only by the will of the waves.
13. Iceage // Beyondless (2018)
Fireworks burst overhead, in a delayed shuffled pattern:
BaDum
Boom
BaDum
Boom
Tss.
More roaring in my ear,
with shrieking vox humanis
it is coupled, hairs prickly
on my spine.
Rael points to the space
in front of us; a darkness,
lit only by intermittent patches
of crimson candlefire — sprinkled
along the land, carpet bombed
luminescence.
More screams from the void
and Rael shouts for us to
run, before the light consumes us.
The darkness’ path of starkness,
smells of ash and serpentine;
my feet lead me through silken threads
of gasoline stench stalking the air
which my eyes cannot conceive.
The squeal of aircraft now
Overhead,
the shatter of voices
in total blackness
and the short bursts of nighttime napalm
—all briefly lived, then perished in the gloaming.
Running the fumes and bombing
fuel to go on
while metallic pings
come from the left and right
of the trench we are in,
where other voices are cut down,
their existence darting from ear level
to mud,
vertically dancing
to the sound of enemy guns.
Rael takes my hand
and points with it ahead:
my eyes adjust from the glimmer
of silver discs in the dark
to see the horizon,
not lit by natural light,
the sun beginning to peek.
The seed of its call,
as it clings and climbs the edge
of the darkness,
is an escape from this
inevitable grave.
Rael runs first,
and I take heed,
to flee the ricochets
and lethal doses of petrol
and death
that suffocate the way out.
My skin tightens:
an urge to supply a demand
of Death, a treatment I owe
to my surroundings—
an urge that has been there from the start,
where there is always something beneath—
an arbitrary thrill,
that never fails to transcend
which I almost pause to provide;
who wouldn’t be missed
if I used the night
to unleash the patrimonial heritage
of life’s relief,
to perform as Death’s drudge?
Rael’s palm swings down
and cups my cheek.
The skin’s sting
is not the real bite:
the guide recalls in me
the need for the emerging sun,
and this escape must be reached, of course:
lifting up, lifting it up,
lift it up.
12. Angel Olsen // All Mirrors (2019)
Awoken by a thrumming heartbeat
growing grander and darker
with each beat,
I come face to face
with Aphrodite’s silhouette—
or so my eyes whisper to me.
She spreads her leathery wings
which almost blot out the sky,
a lark daring me to dream on,
elevating her voice to new
planes of sense,
filtered through cold passages
in synthesised Gothic halls.
I scan the black platform
on which I’m kneeling,
hoping to find Rael.
Instead,
the vision of Aphrodite
threatens to shape-shift—
should I get too close to understanding
the heavens that fuel its voice,
a voice that beats
into my stomach,
suffering my heart,
forcing it to sink
and meet the beaten gut.
Pointy shards of sparkling mirrors
sprout like seedlings in fast motion
erupting from the ground,
each one reflecting only
the silhouette
and not their true surroundings.
She ponders each reflection,
distinct in their representation:
saddened acoustic-brandishing soul pourer,
tinsel-haired jumpy rocker
and shadowed creation of the sky
bellowing above a wall of sound.
In all mirrors,
angelic beauty
once had, now lost,
is lamented by the silhouette.
I inch closer
slowly,
determined to see for myself:
indeed each reflects a transformation,
but they shine like stars from a distant galaxy
burning on elements unknown to our own
exposing beauty unearthly.
It’s easy to see the truth
but knowing what it is,
it’s not enough:
I draw closer
mesmerised enough
to extinguish the silhouette’s false notion,
but her wings spread,
flapping a silvery haze
out from the earth,
changing from black to ice
in the whirlwind process.
There being a distance between us
wrought by the haze,
so thick as to be unnavigable,
Rael falls from the sky
behind me on the platform
then rises to his feet
endeavouring to carry me
away from the fog,
saying we will greet the silhouette
in another form again.
11. PJ Harvey // Let England Shake (2011)
“These are the words; —”
a rusted sign speaks
on a crumbling rusted gate
protecting fields of roses
or daisies covered in a dark shade of blood
(I cannot clearly tell)
my nostrils
by rotted flesh penetrated, carried
on a cold, dampened breeze, carried
by a swarm of flies.
Rael,
where have you taken me?
He places his palm under
my chin, as if to hold
an unfilled chalice
“Watch.”
A smoke cloud, upon which the flies ride,
is distilled from the air in front of me.
Young men,
all clad in drab camouflage:
Khaki drill, Brodie helmets, and puttees
stained with both the blood and mud
of other peoples.
Charging, marching ever forward
into scenes of generation death,
nightmares of mourning mothers—
all manner of things I’ll want to forget:
silent birds, soldiers falling
under the weight of lifeless limbs and hardened lead
like shredded lumps of meat.
Wave
after wave
propelling themselves
against machine gun fire
greeting the dirt of chasms with faces
that have barely begun to see the sky.
Reverie plays again
and again,
and again and
bodies throw themselves in the line of
fire
hot metal tears through their skin,
bursting and flaying it like an orange peel;
tears through their flesh,
like an axe through a cord of wood;
tears through bone, as if glass were shattering
on cold marble forever.
I stumble, staggering to my knee,
my body weak and shivering,
all I smell is rapidly rotting flesh
and sickness fills my stomach.
Rael props me up by linking arms, but to no use:
the sickness seeps up my throat
to my mouth, like a tendril through my body—
suddenly a lightbeam strikes the centre of the battlefield carnage:
the bodies continue to pile up
one upon another
but the collapse of life is slowed to
a moment of flight,
a measure of sight.
The source a hovering silhouette
shimmering in pure whiteness,
with arms spread apart.
The sickness in me departs,
as the figure reveals another plane of being,
in which guts and blood and shattered skull
and tanks and feet
—marching feet—
no longer make for the world’s foundations,
nor the way in which glorious lands are sown.