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leaving school behind

uploaded: Sat, Aug 25, 2012 @ 4:23 PM last modified: Sat, Aug 25, 2012 @ 4:25 PM (add)

by	robwalkerpoet
Featuring	Gurdonark
length	3:22
Recommends	Recommends (8)

leaving school behind

as you leave the school behind at lunchtime - eight lessons down, three to go - the individual squeals of children meld to a distant discord and you are swallowed by the dormitory suburb. neat houses behind electric shutters which might contain other humans- or not. the roads of childhood straight as a diagonal shortcut across a vacant block are no longer in vogue. in the New Suburbia curves are de rigeur. footpaths, kerbs & berms designed with civil engineers’ compasses, in perfect arcs as rare in nature as the straight line. it’s a quilt of patches that don’t quite merge. one owner’s fescue selvaged to his neighbour’s buffalo grass. visible mending. in the no-man’s-land of borders and disputed territory- the verge, the drains, nature reasserts herself with a welcome entropy of tangled mustardweed, marshmallows, artichokes & impenetrable tufts of phalaris. in this suburb divided up like lessons or rows of desks, you find yourself drawn towards disorder. the creek They will never tame. the weeds. as you leave the school behind at lunchtime the individual squeals of children meld to a distant discord and you are swallowed by the dormitory suburb. and you are swallowed by the dormitory suburb

© rob walker, 2007.

One of the few audio poems of mine that has never been published in print. In 2007 I was leaving school @ lunchtime (the original title) quite a lot for the sake of my own sanity. One day it turned into a poem. I mixed it with some string-quartet-type-sounds on Garageband. It made it on the GoingDownSwinging double-CD #25, 2007.
This time I’ve rerecorded the vocal and mixed it with Gurdonark’s minimalist Sensitive and added a little shakuhachi for atmospherics. My thanks to Gurdonark for yet another beautiful composition to work with.
http://www.negativesoundins...