Utterly Simple: Issa's Sunday Service, #80

Today's Sunday selection is another chosen this week "at random" by the mp3 player: Traffic's "Utterly Simple."   This song is a Dave Mason composition, one of his earliest according to the All Music Guide, and an early version of it first appeared on the soundtrack of the movie, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.   As to its literary aspirations, here's the first verse:

Everything really is stupidly simple
And yet all around is utter confusion
Fairy tales written may help you to see it
Do you understand about Lewis's Alice?
We fit all our lives into regular patterns
All that we really know is that we're really living

The Alice books, along with the Bible, are among literature subjects most referred to in rock lyrics.  I listened to this song hundreds of times and never caught the reference (till this week's Ipod playing) and so it goes for mp3 listening being such a sonically degrading experience.  I've always been a big fan of Traffic, their handful of early albums being some of the finest music to come out of the 60s pop/rock experience.   This one is an old fav and their first single:

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In the regular featured archive poems, we seem to be at a spot where there is a lot of Albert Huffstickler (and here's a whole bunch).  What a fine spot to be!  Here are two short poems from #124 from March 2002 - enjoy.

She wants so much
to be like the others.
I understand.
How could I not?
But it's the wanting
that defeats her.
The wanting
defeats us all.

Everyone leaves
a different silence
on departing:
it's like a signature.

Albert Huffstickler

butterfly flits
as if wanting nothing
in this world

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

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