Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Cox Family, Emily Dickinson and Bob Dylan; Mountain Mama pays homage to trouble

This week’s Mountain Mama’s Earth Music works through some troubles.

Listen in by logging onto kdrt.org or follow this link

http://kdrt.org/station/archives/123

Here”s the script:

1) Double Trouble, Lynyrd Skynyrd 3:20
2) Pepper, Butthole Surfers 4:57
3) There Goes the Neighborhood, Sheryl Crow 5:00

The Bad Mother
by Susan Griffin
The bad mother wakes from dreams
of imperfection trying to be perfection.
All night she’s engineered a train
too heavy with supplies
to the interior. She fails.
The child she loves
has taken on bad habits, cigarettes
maybe even drugs. She
recognizes lies. You don’t
fool me, she wants to say,
the bad mother, ready to play
and win.
This lamb who’s gone –
this infant she is
pinioned to – does not listen,
she drives with all her magic down a
different route to darkness where
all life begins.

4) Things Have Changed, Bob Dylan 5:11
5) Breakdown, Tom Petty 2:43

Somewhere Under The Bridge
By Karen J. Weyant

Kids used to hang out. Hussies said my grandmother
of girls who wore their skirts too short,

and teased their hair too high, while my mother
dismissed the boys who hooked their thumbs

in the belt loops of their jeans as bad elements.
The brown water didn’t flow here, but lurked,

aometimes oozed, tossing Marlboro packs
and Pepsi cans aside, swallowing beer bottles whole,

papermill phlegm always clinging to the current.
Even then, I knew water could burn.

A neighbor from Cleveland told of a river,
Slick with oil and debris, catching fire,

and there was always adult talk of our river –
Warnings to never wade, never swim

never, ever eat the fish. That summer,
I slipped into my brother’s cracked leather jacket,

and flipped my hair high, waiting
for the flick of a cigarette, and the flame.

6) El Camino, Elizabeth Cook 2:44
7) Black T-Shirt, Slaid Cleaves, 3:14
8) As Is, Ani DiFranco 4:06

A Toast
Allison Meraz
I have a teensy catalog of confessions
and you are all doomed to listen,
have your heads held underewater
while I whip myself over the damage,
the people I’ve forgotten
and the flowers I’ve plucked to pieces,
ao let me count the ways:
I’ve strolled the museum
and offered no donation.
I left my print on the Rosetta Stone,
licked the Elgin Marbles and shook hands
with the reluctant mummy.
Who was I to think I owned everything?
Like any obese chef or heavy drinker,
I want more of what I’ve tasted:
I confess to gluttony, callousness,
a penchant for vandalism and shoplifting
and never a speck of remorse.
Yet, I would tear back the best times
to mourn my last grandfather’s funeral,
witness my vacant chair in the family gallery
where I should have been properly seated,
not drunk on museums, learning
what it was to be a lover in a foreign country.
I could have at least tipped a cow in homage
to his favorite childhood pastime.
He’d understand all of this, I’m sure,
reckless as he was, how he knew
in each generation the same ache
against shelter and guilt.
Here’s to my grandfather,
an ancient Irishman in the modern world
and still with it, beaming on his deathbed
from single malt and morphine;
I should have been at his side, panting
for his last words with the other
fat and thankless grandchildren.
In the end, he bestowed on me
the final gift of selfishness,
His own sense of satisfaction and vanity:
she was always my favorite,
the smartest with the smallest nose,
he murmured, before the entire family,
and what could my mother do but smirk.

9) Sympathy for the Devil, The Rolling Stones 6:17
10) Give It Away, Red Hot Chili Peppers 4:44
Nobody Said
by Adrienne Su
I would enter the city
of birth and death,
be gouged in the marketplace,
inhabit the deepest
joy and culpability,
snd be unable to communicate.

Dependent as never before
just as people and words began
to fail me. I’d operate machinery
that had never been tested,
then be held liable
gor the whole of the factory.

At last I’d be torn,
not limb from limb
as in mythology,
but like a sheet of paper
on which I’d started a song
they wouldn’t give back to me.

11) I Am Weary, The Cox Family 3:14

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
by Emily Dickinson

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –

And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard – And sore must be the storm – That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm –

I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.
.

12) I’ll Be Around, Bobby Bare Jr. 4:36

Mountain Mama’s Earth Music is heard here on KDRT 95.7 FM, in Davis, CA and you can check out today’s play list, listen to the show or any of other great shows any old time by logging onto KDRT.org.

Thanks for listening in to this lethargic offering to the winding road that is trouble.

Peace
13) Let My Love Open the Door, Pete Townshend 2:44