\t\t\t\twhen the music’s over.
\nshut the snap on the useless travel satchel.
\nuntil the end
\ni see me in a hoary motel room
\npecking at a tiny keyboard, the
\ntext landing far away,
\ndeposited as evidence and
\nceaseless accumulation,
\ninvisible to me.<\/p>\n
I don’t want to see it.
\nLike Dmitry Kolesnikov,
\nthe Russian naval officer who wrote
\n“I am writing blind”
\nas the Kursk transformed from a
\nsubmarine into a
\ncylindrical crypt
\nI, too, will inexplicably scrawl text to the last,
\nI shall face my
\nmotel room demise with an
\noverhead light
\nor a miner’s cap
\nor i shall hold the phone just so
\nso as to light the keys
\nso so.<\/p>\n
a subway roars overhead
\nI see its glimmering reflection in a
\nglass doorway.
\nI am away from home, I am not far but
\nto me a “travel” can be
\n30 feet from home,
\nwhy must travel be to another land?
\nadventure needs no special place.
\nam I on the road when my
\nbed is but 100 yards away?
\noff the road?<\/p>\n
“the road” reminds me of The Band
\nand Neil Diamond
\ntheir self-important talk of
\nthe road and the stage, that
\n“god damndest most spiritually psychotic woman you ever saw”
\nto parameld both entity’s pretentions about their
\nplace of work,
\nrabbi robertson shoplifting baloney
\nunder his trench coat
\nwith the rest of The Band.
\nI mean was The Band
\nsuch a big deal that I must
\nlisten to them preach, listen to them
\nsupply their own posterity to the
\ndownstream victors who
\nwrite and create history,
\nwith talk about
\nshoplifting baloney
\nfrom a grocery store?<\/p>\n
“on the road” is a dangerous clich\u00e9
\nsummoning in the mind, “American pie”-style,
\nevery single word of the
\nwillie nelson song.
\nmy mother reviled willie nelson
\nand over time I came to agree that
\n“Always On My Mind”
\nis a scrawl of misogyny in which
\nmr. nelson tenderly explains<\/p>\n
“I ignored you,
\nI neglected you,
\nI treated you like a dog,
\nI may have abused you.
\nbut Iiiiiiiiii was thinkin’ about ya.”<\/i><\/p>\n
I imagine him tapping his forehead,
\ntheatrically thoughtful,
\nmasculinely self-centered,
\ngrinning like a disaster as he
\nexcuses all with a whitewash.
\nsorriest love song
\never,
\nlacking
\nas it does,
\nany love.
\ni saw willie
\nsing that song at woodstock
\nyuppie woodstock
\ntourist woodstock
\nand the crowd fell silent
\ncontemplative
\nintellectual
\nwinds of instinct
\nblowing through their
\ngrins as
\nwillie sang the timeless ballad.<\/p>\n
on the bus from
\nbethel to port authority
\ni met a man
\nwho had seen willie
\nseen willie 80 times
\nseen willie
\n80 times
\nand it made him powerful
\nthe man was powerful for he had
\nseen willie 80 times.
\nhe travelled abroad to see willie,
\nand travel, too, made this man
\never more powerful,
\never more the authority for
\nall things willie.
\nI knew his type and i
\nlet him preach,
\nlet him nourish history with
\nhis accounts of willie as a young man,
\nwillie in washington, d.c.,
\nwillie on television,
\nwillie at his finest and
\nwillie at his worst.
\n“I seen him 80 times now.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poems","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paumAn-fs","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=958"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/958\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}