when the music’s over.
shut the snap on the useless travel satchel.
until the end
i see me in a hoary motel room
pecking at a tiny keyboard, the
text landing far away,
deposited as evidence and
ceaseless accumulation,
invisible to me.
I don’t want to see it.
Like Dmitry Kolesnikov,
the Russian naval officer who wrote
“I am writing blind”
as the Kursk transformed from a
submarine into a
cylindrical crypt
I, too, will inexplicably scrawl text to the last,
I shall face my
motel room demise with an
overhead light
or a miner’s cap
or i shall hold the phone just so
so as to light the keys
so so.
a subway roars overhead
I see its glimmering reflection in a
glass doorway.
I am away from home, I am not far but
to me a “travel” can be
30 feet from home,
why must travel be to another land?
adventure needs no special place.
am I on the road when my
bed is but 100 yards away?
off the road?
“the road” reminds me of The Band
and Neil Diamond
their self-important talk of
the road and the stage, that
“god damndest most spiritually psychotic woman you ever saw”
to parameld both entity’s pretentions about their
place of work,
rabbi robertson shoplifting baloney
under his trench coat
with the rest of The Band.
I mean was The Band
such a big deal that I must
listen to them preach, listen to them
supply their own posterity to the
downstream victors who
write and create history,
with talk about
shoplifting baloney
from a grocery store?
“on the road” is a dangerous cliché
summoning in the mind, “American pie”-style,
every single word of the
willie nelson song.
my mother reviled willie nelson
and over time I came to agree that
“Always On My Mind”
is a scrawl of misogyny in which
mr. nelson tenderly explains
“I ignored you,
I neglected you,
I treated you like a dog,
I may have abused you.
but Iiiiiiiiii was thinkin’ about ya.”
I imagine him tapping his forehead,
theatrically thoughtful,
masculinely self-centered,
grinning like a disaster as he
excuses all with a whitewash.
sorriest love song
ever,
lacking
as it does,
any love.
i saw willie
sing that song at woodstock
yuppie woodstock
tourist woodstock
and the crowd fell silent
contemplative
intellectual
winds of instinct
blowing through their
grins as
willie sang the timeless ballad.
on the bus from
bethel to port authority
i met a man
who had seen willie
seen willie 80 times
seen willie
80 times
and it made him powerful
the man was powerful for he had
seen willie 80 times.
he travelled abroad to see willie,
and travel, too, made this man
ever more powerful,
ever more the authority for
all things willie.
I knew his type and i
let him preach,
let him nourish history with
his accounts of willie as a young man,
willie in washington, d.c.,
willie on television,
willie at his finest and
willie at his worst.
“I seen him 80 times now.”
