Those Mixolydian chords
And that 350-pound voice
Singing the heart out of an emaciated junkie
How I flow with the wave of the arena hive
As if we are one with the bass and drums
And the ineffable sighs that come from feeling everything
So we give everything,
All of our attention
To what happens on the stage:
Does he have teeth missing?
Is his guitar hero drowning him out of spite?
Or is distortion just cool dangerous,
A contract they both signed,
Like blood on the label, when they were
Too young to know anything but hunger?
Or so we speculate,
The intention cultivators,
The wise ones among us, who’ve read
All the interviews,
Examined fanzine notes
And traded tapes like monks eye scriptures.
There’s darkness in his eyes, yes,
Behind the dark star shades
And his movements are not those of a normal person.
Thus we observe his obscura
As if the key to our own authenticity, and the way
We were disappointed by what he never promised.
Even he, the God, will not admit
How powerless he was, how abused,
Though everything he does and is judged so mercilessly for
Stems from not feeling safe
Among other humans, so he screams
His symphony of closure on unprotected childhood
In silenced-lion roar nevermore
Out of the legend of a garage
He seemed to whistle from like software
As if already dead
Or exploded broken on the scene
Or doubtful at least his existence was worth living.
His sound flew over any disclosure
Of the thing he once wanted
To say, but couldn’t, then or now
And the wind carried it away
To the ravenous heart of the Americas
Who were never told such truths anyway,
Though we collectively
Experienced the many same indignities
To growing up not effed up in the 80’s,
The latchkeys never listened for,
The no at each hint of resistance
To the noises made by monsters in their sleep.
We take the monster’s mike
And dance his dance
But the thing that tells us who we are eludes
As the string of indulgences blur
Of date rape, paint and brownstone
That spins our vortex in circles around,
Humming all day long its forlorn tune, a mix
Of redemption with more suffering,
Release with more revolution on the wheel.
He no longer cares
If his fear arithmetic carries,
His anarchist brain forgets the moment everything burns
Why he poured the gasoline in the first place,
For something has been released, and he’s
Still disguised inside what he is not:
A modified 12-bar blues
Infused with everyone’s agendas
From the hair stylist to the road crew,
A family of sorts, or a nest
Of kibbitzers, if you listen in too closely.
We own him 'cos he doesn’t own himself.
And we render
Unto middleman Caesar our coins
But our hearts go to what he is not able to conjure
From the invisible, for us to find ourselves
With our senses. There's just a feeling of movement,
An orbit around any center that will hold.
It’s not the same working through the chords
On old guitars and trying to sing his tremolo.
He owns us as we own him.
We call his a tragedy
But it is our own drama magnified
Until it can be seen, or, more accurately,
No longer identified
Except as fantasy realized,
That thing in the needle you never see.
