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  • American Thicket CD
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    CD come in a beautiful digipack designed by Espen Friberg, with photography by Michelle Arcila Opsvik. Includes one track not available through download.

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lyrics

These audacious blossoms
are a figment of forced observation,
the exhaust for which they feel affection
nothing greater than your childhood –
you never flew off through the windshield
and Black Friday was never as important as it seemed.
What difference does it make if birds come cunningly,
like trumpets through a wall of angry light,
if the mountains are indeed just shaking out an itch?
There never were any Indians in Columbus’ America.

Such an unenthusiastic landscape,
to its credit went your daily limp:
the harvest was arbitrary –
what did you expect to find?
This tiny country is a thing of the past,
that seed just the parachute of the first world
whose dance meant little more than distraction,
whose layers of years peering out of houses
were so quick to leave your sight,
no wonder that sickle never touched the ground,
the ground to whose shoulders
you still attribute your seasonal fatigue.

Now, when you’re feeling over-sweetly moved
by the quiet hum of passing traffic,
there’s always an uncertain anxiety,
and tassels growing listless in the breeze
to keep you feeling like you’re tied to a reality,
or at least longing to be held in check.
At least there’s movement
in uncertainty – it befits you
to feel a certain shock at your own audacity,
or maybe your humility
is beaming toward the surface.
Maybe you should have thought
twice, before creating
the conditions for advice.

If you depart before we have a chance
to say goodbye, at least you know
that there’s nothing in teaching
that should ever resemble
someone’s pride being shattered.
If you want to know,
this has been a pleasant encounter
for me, and I hope one day
these over-sweet sentiments
are just coming to a close
when we meet again,
somewhere outside of here.

credits

from American Thicket, released July 8, 2016

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Eliot Cardinaux image

Eliot Cardinaux Amherst, Massachusetts

Born in Dayton, Ohio in 1984, Eliot Cardinaux is a poet and pianist now living in Northampton, Massachusetts. He is the founder of The Bodily Press through which he has released the works of others, as well as several of his own chapbooks & CDs.

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