SAM RASNAKE
Exile on Main St.
- Nellcôte, Villefranche-sur-Mer, 1971
In it and not of it is how to begin. With the sweet and bitter fruit of carrying the whole of loss in your veins, in the scars of a would-be lifetime out of control, out of bounds, a freak of time and place, with the eyeball pressed to the crowd, all anger and rage - all anger and rage. We are not from here. The desperation of spent flowers on the mantle, of rolled paper on the table, empty bottles about the floor - Fellini, with a raw touch of smoke & flesh & food & wine for the radical heart's darkest hunger. Through a door and down the stairs, the guitar's hard-edged howl, smearing over the cool stones of a basement wall, with its new vocabulary of hot and dingy to percussive shots of kick and boom. The sax is a slow river, all misted over, in the decadent drift of summer nights - no roads leading anywhere, no want to find one, no dawn to come scratching at the window to be let in.
Sam Rasnake's works, receiving four nominations for a Pushcart Prize, have appeared in OCHO, Shampoo, FRiGG, Poets/Artists, BLIP, MiPOesias, and BluePrintReview, as well as the anthologies Best of the Web 2009 (Dzanc Books), and BOXCAR Poetry Review Anthology 2. His latest collections are Lessons in Morphology (GOSS183, 2010) and Inside a Broken Clock (Finishing Line Press, 2010). His website is www.bluefifthreview.wordpress.com