Jem Bosatta

Here it is at last. I made six songs from the heart and transformed them into something you could have in your hands so that my heart was kind of in your hands. It's not an object that actually contains the music, like a CD, but a beautiful new thing, a tiny fold-out booklet or pamphlet. It sings without singing, it suggests, it sublimates the music through its elegance and design.

Order via my Bandcamp page above.

it's out! it's out! it's a triple single: A-side + B-side + live tune! wow - 3 songs out, 3 to release, 4 in production and 2-3 more in demo. as we might have mentioned, we got randomly banned from intsargam just after uploading this single. so we're spreading the world in a sort of free unbeholden manner - which is fun, but we need your help. add it to a playlist, show it to a friend, send it to your nan. also out on Bandcamp of course, where you can chip in with a few coins to help keep the lights on. tomorrow we'll thank everyone involved, today just sit back and listen. bless you all

is my best to never let meek silences fester and spread like disease is speak about my unease that I live in prosperity and peace and others, terror and grief

is move my feet, (arm in arm, side by side, in the street, though despair seems abundant and cheap and though the price of belief seems steep) is invest, be dressed in, belief is disagree loudly, uncomfortably (lovingly thrash out our discord in passionate discourse, listen & learn)

because these are not my bridges to burn or to leave to decay, not my ties to fray (what for me is a matter of right & left, for others is life & death, and the risks of rupture are not mine to afford and the price of my piety is not mine to pay) because silence like rot will gnaw at the supports,

song prompts: about to get married / large mouth / "this morning i am irrationally happy"

i wrote a song for my newlywed friends, imagining archaeologists digging them up and deducing they were objectively, rationally the happiest couple of all time.

You're not everything i want - this at least i know is true - but suddenly to my mind comes the sight of me and you in a slow close waltz in an empty white room while an old hoarse record spins a sad lovely tune.

I want a sad lovely tune in an empty white room, to be danced in the arms of you - this at least I know to be true.

IF: graffiti = things scratched, = "HERE" (first person singular), = vain clawing of author at eternity = washable

THEN: sfioriti = things brushed against = the wear of a million feet on a stone step = "HERE" (first person plural) = cry of the countless nameless deathless

Street-level apartment She's in there dusting No sunlight while I linger

"Siamo amici", the taxi driver says, "we are friends".

Only you hold your celestial bodies together, weaving a cloth across loose constellations on the loom of your mind's eye. Only you can feel at your known edges for what's tasselled, what's unfinished, what's frayed.

Meanwhile I

am yet to discern the same shape of you twice in two night skies; to see, behind the slow spin of tales and dreams, your half-dozen white-hot elemental seams that cannot be unmade.

One bald man to another, slaps the tea-towel on his shoulder, it’s daybreak at the night café, the overnight shift is over.

The sun hangs up his jacket, we all three share a yawn, the moon does a French exit, the night café at dawn.

Where the elders had gone to dig or die, left ruins and ghosts

Where I struck upon a borderstone that marked an edge of myself

I heard a hushed warning, I felt a warm, pregnant wind, I traced on my shoulders the red where cares once hung

Then, turning once more to bow to the night behind I stepped on beyond and swallowed the desert

Days I hear my own breath, face to face with the dance with death and the cracks let the sighs creep in - Heaven's where I'm going, home's where I've been.

Days when the mirror wakes up, face to face with a half-full cup and the cracks let the dark flood in - Whole's where I'm going, empty's where I've been.

Days when my head feels loose, guts want war, lungs want truce and time seeps through the cracks in my skin - Earth's where I'm going, body's where I've been.

tobacco burns spilling from the sacrifice, live lost shoals of silverblue fish pulsating around us megafauna

What points to the sky? Antennae, mourning wishes, maradona's eyes

it is about the pose and about the fall and all that happens in between,

about your body's call to stay with you always just ahead of what my mind thinks it knows -

about the heat that leaps from charred wick to shivering flame -

this dance can't be made grand or kept clean -

it's not about the strength of our backs or the grace of our hands it's about what can't be seen

about my body's call to fall with me always just ahead of what your mind thinks it understands -

about the heat that leaps from my breath to your name -

about two candles that burn in an empty white room for no other eyes -

this dance doesn't arc towards becoming perfect, only free, then, maybe, wise

Sorry,

it's just I'm not used to having a a heart so full and

no paper

Today I learnt things about us - that my hands know  you better than my

mind's eye -

that care is a spring where we all can drink, surprised to find it will never

go dry -

I didn't say I missed you  cos you were there. now the missing has grown

deeper, greater

I miss you. I didn't say but I do. I'll not text

you later.

jem bosatta