Two-Word Poem were a band out of Akron, Ohio who never made the big time as we imagine it, albums and money and touring and the girls, but they carved out a piece of my heart and took it away with them when they broke up for good in 1974. I fell in love to the sound of Two-Word Poem’s “Bring It” and made love for the first time with the slow and sly rhythm of their gorgeous ballad “Up on the High Hill” playing in the background on a portable Dansette record player that was mono and covered in red plastic.
It was 1971 and I was 15 and the girl was a few months younger, although she seemed the more grown up. Dead within the year, in a car crashed by the supremely hip 17 year old who took her away from me and killed what was left of my heart with her. The twenty-fourth day of April. Same one that saw 500,000 people in Washington, DC and 125,000 in San Francisco march against the Vietnam War and still we’re asking; what are we fighting for, who are we dying for? Jane Hardwick was her name. A girl never to bear babies. On that same day a tsunami 250 feet high rose over the Ryukyu Islands in Japan and threw a 750 ton block of coral more than a mile inland. I dream that some day I’ll get an email from her, that she’ll track me down, explain.
Two-Word Poem were a band out of Akron, Ohio who are long gone. Four guys whose names I couldn’t tell you. A week after Jane was killed, on May 1, Violet Jessop, who’d been born in 1887 also died. She’d been a survivor of the Titanic. Led a long life and is still known for something by more folks than those she just touched or kissed or fed. In death we want to be loved, but more than anything to be remembered.
Sat here my only thought is that I wish I'd come sooner. Not a sentence that makes much sense, but what I mean is it's become clear to me that it's a hard road to be forever pursuing the past. And I know that now and I wish I'd have come to it before, would have saved myself from believing, although while I did I was happier than I am sat here, but blind. At last I can see clearly and, of course, what I see is nothing, for there is nothing here to see.
The food is terrible, the portions worse. I cannot summon thankful, the line is dead, the wire cut, the mystery become frayed. And I am afraid and there's no more time and the urge to root for myself has left me. The feeling comes straight out of one of their best and moodiest songs which closes: Rejected by the Jews and hunted down by Navaho, my girlfriend left me Wednesday and since then Hell’s been awful slow….