Quinn Collins's Nervous Aluminum Rabbit is a setting of a surreal poem by Matt Hart, backed by a driving electronic track. The ensemble plays pulsing rhythmic figures below the declamatory vocal line, which vacillates between sung and spoken figures, as well as between the comic and the tragic.
— Jeffrey Gavett
by Matt Hart
Does burn. Is burn. Ha! I stole that
from a friend, but I don't think she'll mind.
My mind, I'm convinced, is a shotgun:
prone to do damage at all the wrong times,
and accurate up to forty-five yards. Dear Melanie,
Hello. It's October, and I'm lost.
Nobody's singing well enough your birthday
to suit me. Let me correct that in my truly
incoherence [sic] voice: Dear Hart,
Good riddance. You're a robot with fangs.
It's 4:15 AM, and I've been up all night
talking talking talking like a parrot in its cage.
Is it true I should know better? Go ahead and feed the meter, and when I get there we'll have snow peas for dinner. Greetings Ridiculous, It's already November,
and somehow the crickets haven't frozen to death.
For hours they're been chirping and kicking up dust.
Earlier, I saw a fire truck going top speed across the lawn with ambulances and cops in a line close behind.
It all made me a little tired, so I stopped
what I was doing--I was slanted, I was rhyming--
and laid down on the couch. How sensible.
And on an unrelated note, Dear Dog, Settle down.
Read a book, get drunk, bite the burs
in your fur. It occurs to me suddenly,
I am nearly in my winter, in deep hibernation
in a cloister of snow. Dear God/ Dear Damage,
The way you do me is uncertain, is enormous and painful. Dear Snowball, Caterwauling, Deep-lake-zoo,
I am but a nervous, aluminum rabbit. Why
can't my mother understand this? Why is my father
asleep in his hole? O dearly, I love you
no matter what I wrote in the note, no matter what
the slick attorney may say to the contrary. Dear Dead,
Hello. It feels good to be finished. Like a flower
with a head wound, I barely function when you're missing.
I start fires and then can't put them out by myself.