no hairband power ballad
broken hearted nostalgic chum
high on the neck twiddle de dee
for thee tonight

no power chord slammed across
the fingerboard rosewood and bridge of ebony
no fingered delicacy rejection ode
for thee tonight

what happens now
between that G string and me
whatever happens a bend away
from the obvious note is my choice

but let it not be the same as always before
let it not be a stumbling around soundhole
as if that were canyon and not foramen magnum
the open spot on the head of my child

in this fresh moment between me and thee
let what creation may come
not be familiar or copycat or influence bound
let it be ours and new and ready to grow up and out

First song I hear today:  
“Box Of Rain.”

I wish I could remember what it felt like
to be a Deadhead.  All that song means to me now
is that some college kid’s being clever
with a hurricane on the way.  But there was a time,
allegedly, according to photos and ticket stubs I’ve saved,
when I knew everything
about everything Deadish and the first notes
would have set me spinning, talking about
concerts in Lewiston, Nassau, Pasadena.

Let me stress that I was never a hippie.
I WAS NEVER A HIPPIE.  Too violent
and cynical ever to have been one,
I’ve owned one tie-dyed shirt in my life
and most of the acid I’ve dealt with 
was my own bitter bile.  But something
there was in me 
once loved the Dead
as a good son loves the first full escape
from home…

Oh, that lifestyle:
no concert ever the same twice,
no song ever the same twice,
no guarantee that you’d ever hear
what you wanted to hear;

goddamn, it was the perfect extended childhood —
everything new and surprising,
every time.  “Nothing to do except
smile, smile, smile.”  Ah, you have to love them now:
such easily marketable icons, such a deep well of symbols,
such a music no one ever even really tried to make.

A hurricane’s coming in tonight.
I have to buy something or other to survive.
Maybe I’ll drag out the old records and listen tonight
but then again, maybe I won’t — 

nothing really to do except worry, worry, worry.

it is too late for me to become
angus young
but I will make some noise
because noise is no respecter of the limits of age
when a half assed old player
has unlmited rage
available to take up the slack
between skill and desire

it’s too late to fall in love with jim carroll
(directly)
but I’ll kiss what I can of him
and hope the taste rubs off

it is too late to rock and roll all night
(every night at least)
and party every day
(at least the way I used to party)
but never too late to move
from consumer to producer

what I need is an amp
and a neck to strangle
what I need is a microphone
and a problem to solve

what I need is feedback

what I need is to make something
everyone’s already made
but do it louder and faster and harder
than I could have done it
back when I was too young
and too concerned about who might be listening

no one’s going to listen to me now

perfect

maybe I’ll become
me
for a moment

At the
tip of my hearing
far away crashes
and thudding rhyme,
high-whine scrawl
of a guitar solo driven 
way, way over:

a heavy metal show at the nightclub down the street.

Hand-horns and denim required for entry.
I feel like I’m not old enough, or too old, 
or built indie-elitist-too cool for school-wrong to go.

I feel like if I don’t go
I will have surrendered,
stepped off the part of the path of wisdom
that leads through excess. Tonight
I want to be one with that certain defiance
that comes through walls
like a stone drill mounted on a Harley,

all the way through selfish walls
to rest near the beating flesh heart
of a whole bigger
than its drum, bass, guitar, and vocal
parts.

Thanks for that ignorance
which led me to pick up the cuatro
that first time in the music store, to put it back on its rack
still knowing nothing of it.

Thanks for that luck which soon led me
to a concert where I saw it played
by its master Yomo Toro, for that stroke
of light and awe that laid me down.

Thanks for the day in Lowell
where I met a luthier who made such things,
who cut them from living trees in the old style
and who played one of his own for me.

Thanks for the surprise of Yomo Toro,
again, appearing before me at a free concert
at the local Latin Festival, once again 
allowing me to bathe in not-knowing’s joy.

Thanks, then, for what happened 
when I heard he was ill, was dying.
Thanks, then, for what drove me
to the local music store that day

to find one, to play one, to know
nothing and play one, to find a song
upon it had gotten stuck to my fingers
and was demanding I take it home

so the song could come forth and breathe.
Thanks for the payday that made it happen.
Thanks for the heat of the day
that made me rush home to play.

So good to be a beginner again.  Good to lay my pen and poems aside,
to leave the guitar in the rut we’ve made for each other,
to stretch and wiggle out the agony in my fretting hand,
to have no clue where I’m going from here with this.

Thanks for how my hands now hurt.  Thanks
for this ignorance and this unclear path
to mastery, again.  Thanks for the untutored
music I have made today — and

thanks above all for Yomo Toro, a fat man in a straw hat
dying somewhere in the Bronx, two hundred miles
from here, who does not and will never know me
and my clumsy songs, but who brought them surely into the world.

Big Joe Turner
could palm a jump blues
like an egg,

handle it rough
but always
without breaking it. 

Listening right now 
to the opening piano ripple
of “Shake Rattle And Roll”

and Big Joe Long Dead
still smites with the soft club
of his voice.

Big Joe I Wish To Have Seen You
Just Once, this is how it must have been
back then:

discovery followed by imitation.
I think I sound good, as good
as you.

The shell fragments on my hands
and the sticky yolk say no.
The heart of me says no too.

Big Joe Turner,
they are starting to forget you
and all your kiss curled imitators too

but Big Joe Turner,
thanks for the musical ache in my bones
that won’t heal no matter what they do or do not do.

To see and believe
in the jazz animal, the cat born
of good darkness and true tone,
is to understand that what we know
is not always explicable.  

To see it crouched
in music on a Saturday night
is not scary, not exactly —
but in the moment of its spring toward target
there may be an apprehension

or concern as to how
the moment after it lands a solid blow
will reflect a complete change in the nature
of our world.  To accept the jazz animal’s
silence in the midst of skeins of sound —

to see in the jazz animal
the bed and backstory of what possibility
music is and holds dear — 
you have to suspend for a moment
your urbanized scoffing at such an explanation

for how you might sit transfixed
after a fill or a run by any or all
of these few instruments on stage —
you have to agree that in that moment,
you’re under the paw of something 

that is older than human, cleaner
than simple entertainment, more surefooted
than you are, certainly.  Have you never seen
a cat make an impossible leap of pure faith?
How can you not acknowledge the jazz animal?