Stephen J. Golds on Gabriel Hart

For Days 22 and 23 of the Cruelest Poetry Month, Five-Two alums Gabriel Hart and Stephen J. Golds' commentaries on each other's collections, to be published by Close to the Bone April 30. Here's Steve on Gabriel's collection Unsongs: Vol. 1. —Gerald So

Gabriel Hart first came to my attention with his twin novellas Virgins in Reverse and The Intrusion. Two Southern Californian stories of twisted love, abuse and over indulgence. The prose was lyrical and poetic. I finished the novellas hoping to read poetry by the author at some point in the future. So bowled over in fact, I contacted Hart asking to read some of his song lyrics as he’s a very well-know musician. He sent them over and my hopes for a poetry collection increased with every song I read. Stellar, vibrant work.

Like all good things in life, good things, do indeed, come to those who wait.
 
Unsongs Volume One (released by Close to the Bone April 30th) is Hart stepping away completely from the roles of prose writer and musician. With this poetry collection he’s really coming into his own. As a poet. A real goddamned poet wanting to seemingly get away from the labels of prose writer and musician and write poetry with his own distinct stylings and themes. As Hart states in the collection’s introduction, “Songs, as we know them today, have become what I like to call ‘ego-jingles’. A singer’s precious little summation of their soul.” So, it’s safe to say, from the first bell, Hart isn’t pulling any punches in wanting to make this all about a purer, refined, deeper lyricism, before everything got so fucking banal, superficial and corporate.

For me, as the happy Editor of Close to the Bone’s Poetry Series, the poem that really epitomizes Hart and this poetry collection is Deep Root Delusion. On first reading the words come hard and fast as though from a burnt-out street hustler or a junky’s bitter, sarcastic limerick to a wasted life but there’s so much more to it than that. As all the best kind of poetry asks of its readers, we need to read it again and again and look at what is really being said here. Really look deeper! There is a deep seated dissatisfaction with conformity, or to exist for simply existing’s sake. It’s about refusing to conform, to go out on your own terms and not apologizing for it. “Pray for death to the obvious / Shake my hand with the ominous / By tearing out every ladder rung / I have not one nail of guilt / For using the sides as stilts / Because I’m walking as high / As they tried to have me strung.”

Hart truly flows his words across the page like electricity lightening up every single word. The alienation, frustration, loss, bewilderment, love, binges felt in every stanza. It’s all here.

The dark and lyrical nature of the poems included within this collection transported me to the aftermath of a California house party gone bad. Patio furniture in the pool. A vinyl LP skipping somewhere. An aching heart and an aching head. The taste of Tequila and an ex-girlfriend on my lips. The L.A. sun burning down on me like a police helicopter’s spot light. Gabriel is a real poet. And maybe the last of a dying breed taking a last gulp on the bottle of Tequila, gazing out across the Californian desert and writing something that needs to be read for all the right reasons.

Watch Gabriel Hart because I’m telling you he’s going to be larger than life and deservedly. —Stephen J. Golds

Gabriel Hart on Stephen J. Golds

For Days 22 and 23 of the Cruelest Poetry Month, Five-Two alums Gabriel Hart and Stephen J. Golds' commentaries on each other's collections, to be published by Close to the Bone April 30. Here's Gabriel on Steve's collection Love Like Bleeding Out with A Gun in Your Hand. —Gerald So

This will be Golds fourth book in eight-months — a maddening pace of prolific napalm between novels and poetry, we’re tempted to wish he’d slow down so we can absorb it all. But when someone is on fire, it could be arrogant to assume they want to be extinguished — especially when they’re the one holding the match. If there’s one thing the pandemic taught us, is that tomorrow is never guaranteed — it’s almost crazier not to write all your most intimate shards of your charred shadow-self out as fast as you can. In many ways, there’s a gun to our head, our mortality ever creeping.

To those who do have a hard time keeping up with Golds, he’s done us a solid here with Love Like Bleeding Out… — it’s a collection of stories and poems mainly published online along with some new pieces, so we have them all at out fingertips in one place.

We’re seeing a further refinement in Steve’s poetry here, a steady maturity since his debut collection Poems for Ghosts in Tenement Windows I Thought I Saw Once from last November. Where in those pages we were gifted the intimacy of a barfly’s thoughts at last call most wouldn’t have the courage to share, here we see a man opening himself up even further — reflecting on his misspent teens that might have influenced the domestic dystopias of a severed marriage, while struggling to maintain a sound fatherhood.

In “Walls” we are not so much a fly observing there as we are buzzing around the carcass of separation, the bleak disintegration moving him out of the family home he helped build. Suddenly, the whiteness of bare walls is more frightening than the dark. It’s the last moments of the husband and wife, the children safe at the grandparents, so anything can be said — though nothing will ever be enough. It seems there can be no redemption here, until the man moves out to his own apartment, watching his two daughters settle into the new digs: “Our daughters plant seeds in small pots and giggle together/Dirt kissing their fingertips and sunshine caressing their long hair/I wipe a tear away quickly and swallow a bittersweet happiness/before they can catch it with their glittering eyes/Now I’m just living for the time I can be with them/like this and they’re free from/our constant, stagnant, gangrenous warring as though/we were the children in the family all along/and we’ve finally grown up and/left home.”

It’s not all musings on the past though — in “Prescriptions,” Golds strives for ultra-presence, solving the expiring effects of modern medicine: These pills, they don’t work/They kill me, resurrect me into/a walking fragment of memory/half-remembered on/a Sunday morning/They ask if I’m taking my meds/I seem tense, they worry/I want to say that/being tense/is better than/being past tense.” Brilliant. —Gabriel Hart

Gabriel Hart

WHEN I MET HER IN THE STREET

When I met her in the street
It was horizontally
I swear I saw her spirit escaping her body
"No, get away," she said.
"Just let me sleep."
"Let's get you up,” I pled.
"Don't fall asleep,
Stay with me."

Her eyes floated up into her head like two balloons
I shook her
Stuttering
That she would feel better soon
But then she spilled her guts
She showed me all her cuts
Like ripping out a tooth
To find the truth

An ambulance
Was out of the question
The way her eyebrows raised
When I offered to call her parents
'Cause though she was a victim
They would say she had sinned
'Cause when you cross The Cross
You have crossed your kin

She finally told me her whole name
But she looked at me like it was a mistake
She couldn't recall their names
Just a white van
No windows
Unmarked plates

I carried her into our home
Keeping vigil
With a vigilante tone
Peering through blinds
For a sign
That justice might prevail

Four nameless medium-build males
God Almighty, you've failed


Gabriel reads "When I Met Her in the Street":



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Gabriel confesses: "The poem was inspired by a real encounter and attempt to help a wounded teenage girl. On top of the terror of what she endured, there was the unforeseen stalemate of us urging police involvement versus the consequences of her religious family finding out what happened."

Author-poet GABRIEL HART lives in Morongo Valley in California's High Desert. His debut twin novel Virgins In Reverse / The Intrusion (Traveling Shoes Press) was released January 2019, with a foreword by Avant-rockabilly provocateur Tav Falco. His chapbook Cinema of Life (2016) and novelette Nothing To See Here (2017) will be incorporated into his upcoming desert speculative fiction novel Lies of Heaven, to be released unabridged by Space Cowboy in 2020. His short-fiction and poetry has recently been published by Cholla Needles, Luna Arcana, Black Hare Press (Australia) and will be the noir-flash of the week in Shotgun Honey this coming June 2020. He is a regular contributor to Space Cowboy’s Simultaneous Times podcast, as well as L.A. Record, a Los Angeles underground music publication. Hart also taught the writing workshop for Mil-Tree, a non-profit reach out program for Vets and Active Duty Military to heal the wounds of war.