In honour of Car Seat Headrest releasing their latest album, Making a Door Less Open, a few days ago, I’ve decided to post this poem for you to enjoy. I wrote it for my poetry workshop class during the final year of my Master’s degree. I was experimenting with different forms and employed terza rima for this poem. Consider it a precursor to the poems for my favourite albums of the 2010s, because my ambition to blend poetry with rock music and music criticism was first attempted here.

On Listening to Car Seat Headrest’s
“Beach Life-In-Death” (2018)

Revived like Lazarus retreating from his maker back into the day,           

faded memories — reflected, reassembled, refracted — prevail         

in the epic, surging in and out of unhinged, tripartite waves.   

At first: an erratic beast that flows like a boiling river beneath rails                     

in swirls of distortion and the headiness of call and response dread:        

The Will redacts its revelations in mumbled deceit, but to no avail.    

The Will’s young mind struggles after being overfed,     

and a dog unleashed after years of being tormented by voices       

wails for an impossible world like some exiled purebred.  

Then the frenetic disappears: the Will oscillates from soullessness to rejoice  

the cycles of small-town boredom, and bopping around in love’s fortune,

before it becomes the hopelessness of being shortlisted among another’s choices.

Wading through life to watch pavements nurture cracks is no virtue;

bearing one’s own humanity in the unwavering routine of prosaic life

is like listening to a guitar forever moving in and out of tune.   

It was the start of nothing — but lurking in the mundane is the strife      

of anxious desires, which are fuelled on the fumes of a sighing exhaust,        

until fury and time hack at them like an unrelenting knife.

The Will’s driving pulse returns, tearing through dreams one cannot trust;

a renewed hope for requited love perks up like dogs’ ears, but strains

and buckles with a fiery realisation that fairytales often turn to bust.

Under guises of psychedelic flair and punk despair, the epic’s personal disdain      

is driven by isolation, driven to put all of humanity to the blade;

but faces painted in youth’s confusing colours will hear a raging refrain,           

where a ferocious Will reveals existential dread pummels our shores in waves—

but they dredge us out from pathos, like an ocean washing open a grave.