The hovering drones and background high frequency, subtle sound like the voices of starlight are the perfect setting for Stephen Durkan’s poem “Prayer.” He speaks of the deep kind of alienation anyone that is half paying attention feels these days of existential dread and exhausted, burned out desperation for any flicker of hope or at least comfort perchance to have something real and vital to look forward to. When Durkan speaks of a life feeling like it’s been pre-programmed and living having becoming like “software running itself.” When he expresses that he doesn’t feel like his actions have any weight and how that makes everything feel heavy, of how we’re all thrown into the world without an instruction manual and a sense that the world only exists to hut you and having no meaningful direction only toward more meaningless fog and fuzz of life in world not built for the nurturing of all but rather the extraction of resources from everything and everyone from material goods as well as the intangibles like time, energy, intellect, creativity and a sense of life and for what? Durkan makes this reality so poignantly personal in the track it can be a bummer but one that actually tells it like it is and in that manifests something that is comprehensible and thus not a hanging, shapeless notion in your mind weighing you down. And so even if you can’t change things right now the awareness means the reality can have less unconscious control over feelings. Listen to the “song” or poem or whatever we can call it on Spotify, listen to the rest of Durkan’s masterful and affecting debut EP The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Ourselves on Spotify or Bandcamp and connect with Durkan at the links provided.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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