Characters Castaway
Moonpie is the god-talker and king of the cantina,
he trades us shrink-wrapped, air-tight
sweeties for the plantains, boars fat hung
around rib and hind, and a million little fish.
Mamasan is the nurse made of nightingale,
toothache, and codeine.
Me, I’m the man in the middle of them—
the cold current, featherless buzzards
scrounging and the thieves.
-Jason Braun
Skipping School and Some Things
I didn’t believe in dumbing down,
not for the teachers, who one day,
reaching to the bottom of a mason
jar, had no answers for my questions.
Remembering Plato or Socrates
was easy. I also drank the poisons
of my day and called them Hot Damn.
Girls from other schools liked
the way I leaned. My best friend
ran internet service provider
during our senior year, when
we weren’t sitting at the coffee shop.
I skipped school, drove over
the river into St. Louis’s Washington
University. A little man lectured
on Darwinism, this you couldn’t get
in Waterloo, Illinois. Keep crawling
you’re not out of the cave yet.
-Jason Braun
Misremembering
It is a foolish thing to forget
your hometown, wrapping
it around a banjo riff,
and joking with city folk
the toothless and cow-tippers.
When the water rises again
from the sinkhole to take
back all your kin, it will
find you on that downtown
rooftop praying to the god
of your parents.
-Jason Braun
Triptych Mirror
Like hairpins made of bone, everything beautiful
about you calls for it’s lost flesh
and nothing I can say into your mouth
makes a goddamn difference.
Once, all this mapped skin wasn’t a curse.
It was a girl who looked to long in the mirror.
-Jason Braun
The Long Terms
I had just closed the door
at your last word. Stepped
like lighting in two ten and half
shoes on the hardwood.
This is what long term
relationships look like, she said.
Her in the corner of a bar leaning
into some guy from work, me stewing
in the wash back and slowly growing
cro-magnom in my grin.
Therapy ain’t cheap. I’ve spent
too long studying stagecraft and nonverbals,
writing’s not on the wall—it’s who touches
who first and how long until they break
doors, red lights, clips, zippers, and nylon.
-Jason Braun
Fidelity
Stronger than the theater’s bass, more
fuzzed out than the old TV tube could muster,
this is how I hear you. Talking under
water or in hailstorm of stones and crows.
They said redundancy is good for radio,
so many signals get lost, and people
aren’t always listening close to the sounds
our words are making. Oh, Marconi,
I know you’re still out there keeping
an eye on me and her. You’re caught
in the rafters or in the half glued egg-
crate studio of some kid looping high-hats
louder that his parents plate-break and door-
slam. What songs and sons would we’ve
birthed into the charts and the stars.
-Jason Braun
A Box To Be Born In
Because I was the second
child. Because I was born
months before my father’s
death. Because its impossible
to count the kindness, favors
my widowed mother granted
me. Because the tender needed
to reprimand a wrist went
against my sister. Because
a dead man’s son is a white,
walking, and sinless shadow.
-Jason Braun
On Visiting the Home of Mark Twain in Hannibal, Missouri
Over two hours in a borrowed car
before we park and navigate
through the small river town stone
streets. This is not Whitman’s
song of myself, learned astronomer,
or pontification on a Brooklyn bridge,
this is the story of the poor. The gap-
tooth owners and the shoeless folks
in cut-off jeans. They live
in close proximity to their animals.
This was the land of straw hats,
moonshine, and slave owning.
Twain didn’t have it easy, transcendental
high roads were washed out.
That’s why he sent Huckleberry
down the river of machinations,
with a white boys memory
of what it’d be like to runaway
on a raft with a man like Jim.
-Jason Braun
Small Talking With a Ghost
After the bi-plane buzz wore off,
she still floated for weeks, into arms
of children. She taught them ABC’s
and taught me to read the iambic line
aloud. After eating barbeque in Brooklyn,
walking arm in arm, mouth to mouth
pass brownstones and the decade’s
momentary decay, she turned the prop
once or twice before it caught, taking
her and our old-fashioned fantasy away.
-Jason Braun
Published: July 19, 2012 Updated 3 hours ago
By Video, story and photos by Zia Nizami — News-Democrat
It’s Saturday night and a small group of hiphop fans sip Miller Highlife in the dark corners of the Firebird in St. Louis as they wait for the show to start.
The opening act, Jason and the Beast take the stage. As saxophone player Adam Sirgany improvises over DJ Matt Jones’ driving hip-hop beats, Jason Braun starts rapping in a spoken word style more akin to beat poet Allen Ginsberg than Snoop Dog.
I am that merry wanderer of the night I am that sight the Beast let loose in Bookhouse Well read but Faust read too in smoky light Stretched tight as snaring drum or strings of Strauss I have lead young lovers ‘stray with serpent tongue Hitting graveyard shifts at coffee shops Spiked the preachers punch Smoked the teacher lung Skipped out on tab but didn’t stiff the bellhop I learned my tricks from Beatniks Let’s Drink to them let’s drink to us Let’s skinny dip with dead of river Styx And knock the dust off Ken Kesey’s bus.
— “The Beast in the Bookhouse.”
Watching Braun confidently belt out his cerebral verses, you would think you were watching someone with a lifelong affinity for the written word. You would be wrong. “I didn’t learn to read till I was 6 and I didn’t enjoy reading till I was 17,” said Braun. “I didn’t even read books on my own volition until my junior year of high school, so I was really a late bloomer.” Braun, 34, grew up near Hecker and attended Waterloo High School. His interest in writing and literature was sparked during his junior year in high school.
Watching Braun confidently belt out his cerebral verses, you would think you were watching someone with a lifelong affinity for the written word. You would be wrong. “I didn’t learn to read till I was 6 and I didn’t enjoy reading till I was 17,” said Braun. “I didn’t even read books on my own volition until my junior year of high school, so I was really a late bloomer.” Braun, 34, grew up near Hecker and attended Waterloo High School. His interest in writing and literature was sparked during his junior year in high school.
“It was Shakespeare that really brought me around. Through reading it aloud, I was able to hear what we were talking about and I was able to make guesses about what these words meant,” Braun said. “He wasn’t writing something to be inflicted as a sort of punishment to high school students. He was writing a show. I didn’t get pleasure for reading the words silently , but to hear the ideas, the jokes — to hear the show.”
Braun started writing poems when he was a senior, and went on to join “Jupiter Jazz,” a musical group that combined indie rock with hiphop and spoken-word poetry. After Jupiter Jazz broke up, Braun started working on a collection of sonnets that would become his first solo album entitled “Birth of the Beast.” His stage name “Jason and the BEAST” is an acknowledgement of the duality of good and evil that exists in all of us. “The idea was a Jekyll and Hyde kind of thing. It plays on the idea that every rapper has a real name and a stage name,” Braun said. “People think poetry is reserved and calm and they think hiphop is aggressive. I wanted to dramatize that misconception and prove that they are the same. Inside all of us there are these various beasts. “
Artists like the Wu Tang Clan and the Beastie Boys may have inspired Braun to become a rapper but he also has some truly “old school” influences.
“I thought if I want to prove hip-hop is poetry, why not use the tools of the old guard, of the staunch formal poets, and turn it into hip-hop. The first sonnet that I said ‘This should be a rap song’ was the ‘Beast in the Book House.’ It starts ‘I am the merry wanderer of the night,’ which is a line from Puck in Shakespeare’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ So I take that line and imagine how a modern day Puck might be and I put in a little bit of autobiography.”
Braun lives in Edwardsville and is working on his master’s degree in English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. He also teaches undergraduate English classes. His editor and faculty adviser, Valerie Vogrin, has a strong appreciation for his music.
“What I think is brilliant about what Jason is doing is that he is trying really hard to combine all of his various passions, his passion for music, for the spoken word, performance, for the written word, poetry, for classic poets,” said Vogrin, a professor of English at SIUE. “He is also really interested in contemporary culture whether it’s hip-hop or rap. It really enlivens all of it. It brings people my age who go to a performance (and) we get one thing out of it and people coming at more of the hip hop angle get a different thing out of it.”
Braun’s latest project is “Made This For You— The Mix Tape is Literature.” The songs are interspersed with excerpts from Braun’s KDHX-FM (88.1) radio show, “Literature for the Halibut,” and recordings Braun made with his iPhone while he was hanging out with his friends.
Braun has also developed an iphone app called “Paradise Lost Office” that provides business advice and a guide to office politics based on John Milton’s poem “Paradise Lost.”
After his set at the Firebird, Braun spends time talking with members of the audience about his music and passes out copies of his new CD.
“When I’m putting on shows, I think that’s a form of teaching. I want to be entertaining first but I also want to kick knowledge,” Braun said. “People are makers now and I believe it makes them better fans as well.
“I believe, whether or not anyone gets famous, writing a song or writing a poem or making a film — I think if you do that you’ve enriched your own life. You’ve taken a risk and you’ve made a small mark on the world even if it’s just for friends and family to see.”
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