Verses on Verses | A little spiral (as a treat)

by LE Francis

Last year ended bad. About November, I reached capacity, I burned up in the atmosphere. I sold a handful of tickets to shows I had been really looking forward to & I barely showed up at the shows I was scheduled to play myself.

At first, I feared that I was broken, that I had entirely severed my social muscle & would have to go hermit-mode again for a few years. Not that I don’t have a thousand writing projects to keep me busy, but I put in a lot of effort to surface socially. I’ve thugged it at poetry mics full of retirees reading pretty bird poems when all I had was that was some intense eye contact & now my brain thinks I’m in love, fuck I’m stupid, he doesn’t even know I exist & aren’t the stars pretty? I spent years doing Ghost in the Magazine, slowly working through hating my voice to hating editing my stupid tangential ranting. & then we went to a video format & I was learning all over again how to deal with hating my face, my voice, the blank look in my eyes when my brain was switching gears. & I catapulted all of that into joining a band again after swearing decades earlier that I’d never perform again.

But by the end of October 2025, I had simply done too much. I was facing down the holidays & my grandpa was dead. He had cancer for some time but became acutely ill around Thanksgiving 2024 & died before his April 2025 birthday. My grandma refused to have a funeral, promptly sold the house & moved into an apartment, my already chronically ill mom came unmoored & went into guilt & grief overdrive, ending up in the hospital with a blood sugar level north of 470. I hardly knew where my head was from all of that & somehow I had to pull myself together & push forward with my projects. I put out spring & fall issues here at Sage Cigarettes, I continued & completed edits on two of my scifi novels, I learned a setlist & some change & played my way through a slew of summer shows with a band that had somehow materialized sequentially from craigslist ads in the chaotic midst of my grandpa’s illness as I was running between houses & medical facilities with food, people, & whatever comfort I could offer my extended family. 

By the time the Sleep Token show came around I tapped out. I sold those tickets & then I sold The Mars Volta tickets, & then Hot Mulligan. 

I had justified the first one with a general annoyance at the local Sleep Token audience. I was lucky enough to catch them in 2023 with the spectacular A.A. Williams & had to listen to adults grown enough to be in the bar screaming unhinged sexual shit at masked British men through both sets. Listen, I’m stoked you’re all horny & up to buy a lot of shit that will keep the band making music. However, at some point I do want to hear the show & I promise you they are not going to fuck you. Rumor has it that a couple banged during the set in the back of the Moda Center show. Greaaaaasy. I’m cool with Sleep Token being a playlist only band going forward.

In retrospect though, I really regret Volta & Hot Mully, both are faves with great new albums in 2025. & there’s always a lull at the end of the year because I live east of the mountain passes in Washington state, so as I write this it’s been a minute since I’ve been to a fun show, someone else’s show, a show that doesn’t require me to lug a million pounds of gear & have to acknowledge when someone says some awkward shit to me (If you approach me at some other dude’s concert & I don’t want to talk to you, I’ll pretend to I’m Hellen Keller, if I’m working, I’ m obligated to be nice).

That said, I think the spiral needed to happen, that something in me needed to heal. Because by the time Hands Above Stars hit our first show of 2026, I gave absolutely zero fucks. I had none of my normal jitters. I functioned as a normal dude — flagging down people I assumed were in other bands when we had questions & striking up conversations with anyone nearby. Which seems like a basic thing, but it’s unusual behavior for me. I’m usually keyed up & afraid I’ll say something stupid.

But after carrying all our shit in & listening to excuses as to why x or y bandmate was late; why the sound guy wasn’t there — spoiler: there was no sound guy booked for that night; I realized I just didn’t care. & the duration of the show further broke me as I saw people I thought knew what they were doing make the absolute fucking worst calls & nobody really reacting besides me standing there with contact cringe.

& I probably played my best show that night, though it was far from our best show as a band. Whenever I did fuck up, I thought, welp that’s not even the worst thing that’s happened tonight & didn’t tense up or search for reproach in my bandmates faces. I just grinned to myself & moved on. At one point my entire pedal board melted down & multiple frequently-used pedals started uncharacteristically feeding back. I calmly switched everything to bypass & tapped my drive level on my amp. It was hardly noticeable, I didn’t care, nobody cared.

Ultimately, I can’t regret the little spiral at the end of the year because I realize that it wasn’t a severance of social muscle rather a moment that called me to step back & finally let it heal so I could come back stronger.

Yeah, I needed to take a break. Yeah, I’m buying a lot less tickets this year. But when I get on stage in a couple of weeks, I’m going to be unbothered. When we release the first single I’ve sung on in over a decade with The Bone Palace later this month – absolutely fucking unbothered.

Life is short & I’ve already left too much unsaid. However long I’ve got left, I plan on being there, standing ten-toes down even when it feels as if I’m being absolutely fucking annoying. & as Frank Reynolds said, I plan on getting real weird with it.

Verses on Verses is a biweekly music column from the perspective of a poet. Inquiries can be directed to LE Francis, lefrancis@sagecigarettes.com.

LE Francis (she/her) is a recovering arts journalist living in the rainshadow of the Washington Cascades. She is the co-EIC of Sage Cigarettes Magazine. She is a Pushcart-nominated poet & her debut chapbook THIS SPELL OF SONG & STAR is available through Bottlecap Press. She plays bass in the indie/prog band Hands Above Stars & makes noises in the shoegaze project The Bone Palace. Find her online at nocturnical.com.