Third draft.  Changes made after reading this at a reading last night.  Comments still welcome.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A white-soled black sneaker,
a Chuck Taylor knockoff,
on sale for 75 dollars
in a store window.

Along the border
of the sole, white thread
on black, the following words:

PUNK ROCK MEANS FREEDOM

I have a violent urge
to stretch out a finger
and blot out
that “S”
so I will be able to breathe again.

In front of me a blond girl, professionally slim,
decked in designer-wrecked rags,
excitedly tells her similar friends
that she wants to get crunk tonight,

while a Ferrari
as black as a hole
bangs out white streams of bass
for the length
of its slow audacious cruise
down Thayer Street.

HIP HOP MEANS FREEDOM —

and again I subtract the “S”
to get at some truth I can stand,

and the more these metaphors are strained,
the more they seem the same.

~~~~

It was 1975

when in two apartments,
one in Queens,
one in the Bronx,

two boys thinking the same thing
stretched out their fingers
and touched grimy windows,

each one writing those same bleeding words
in the gray condensation
on the pane:

Mean Freedom.

The city was falling apart around them both,

and each had a soundtrack
behind him,

and the boys who wrote those words
did not know each other
but for each their soundtrack
was freedom
and for each the soundtrack
was as mean as it was free.

There was a reason for the rhyme
and a reason for the sharp scratch

of guitar and turntable.
You had to be there, but
soon there was everywhere

and that was that.  A snarl
and a linking of arms. A beat
and a charming discord.

A free hand against the slapdown.

~~~~~

Let us proclaim
the mysteries of faith:

To deface a culture
is to create a culture.

Distortion
of a signal
begins with a tight embrace
of its source.

Degradation
of a signal
is a function of distance
from source.

A clean channel
doesn’t exist.

Genre is expectation.

Expectation can be packaged
for indefinite shelf life.

There is a shelf in the store for every expectation.

~~~~~~~

If you are hip hop,
if you are punk rock,
you understand that theft
is your birthright
and whenever you steal from a thief
you are washed free of stain.

A tag is reclamation.
A sample is recommendation.
A headspin is a compass in a maze.
A microphone is always aimed at Jericho.

A crunched chord is a fingerprint.
A sneer is an oath sworn in a kangaroo court.
A downbeat is a sustained objection.
A mohawk is a crown of broken handcuffs

and a microphone is always aimed at Jericho.

Whatever it is
is always defined by volume.

It does not matter
that the sound
will be heard by different people
in different worlds.

It matters
that those worlds shake the same way,
and that someone always complains.

It matters
that it is not heard as music
by musicians.

It matters
that the instruments are dismissed,
the clothing is spat on,
that the culture of the cultured becomes afraid,

that spatter and cut and mix and shred
are chained to the juggernaut
and drag the weight of freedom behind them,
mean freedom inflicting itself with a roar and rumble
of jubilation
at the sound of breaking glass,

and then,
always,
someone buys the shards
and the sound,
sells them at a profit,

and we have to begin again.

~~~~~~~

Mean freedom
understands that freedom will hurt.
That there will be blood flecked skin
when the hand travels through glass
to snatch back what was taken.

Mean freedom doesn’t wait for Independence Day.
Mean freedom lights its fuses any time a match is available.

Mean freedom haunts.  It spooks
convention.  It curses and spits
because it knows it will be imprisoned again
at some point.

Mean freedom
makes us grit in the cogs, the static
in the signal.

~~~~~~~~~~

The signal
degrades, fades,
a channel
falls like a rusted bridge,
a supercar goes boom,
a college girl gets crunk  —

and an old punk
steeped in nostalgia
reimagines a slogan.

An embrace tightens and distorts
both holder and what is held.
Long ago I fell into arms
that bent me tight.
I burned holes in my jeans at 18.
I burned my hand with a cigarette at 23
then quit smoking for 25 years
only to begin again
on the street tonight,
standing by the store window,
bathed in the sounds of war,

because I am reminded that every riot
starts with the sound of breaking glass
and ends in fire.

I smash the window,
toss the sneaker at the Ferrari,
run like hell itself is after me.

God, how I have missed this.

~~~~~~

Somewhere back in 1975,

those boys
gathered the fingers they had just used
to write on those dirty windows
back into their fists.

They punched out the glass
and in the trickling blood they felt
at last
the cool sting of the real.

Freedom
rocked from side to side,
shouting as it
prepared a counterpunch:

That’s a good start,
but if you come through that window after me,
I will not let you pass any more walls
without a war.

Bring it on,
responded the bleeding boys,

when we scream for freedom,
we mean freedom.
Is that really your name?
Is this really your song?

And now, thirty five years later,
one more question:

How much is this gonna cost?

Save your voice,
Tom Waits;
there’s not enough tender gravel
in the world.

Save your shades,
Bob Dylan;
what you see under the bare land
needs your filter.

Save your hat,
Leonard Cohen;
something unrusted might yet escape
through the top of your head.

Save your battered guitar,
Ellen McIlwaine;
something remains to be drawn
from the funk inside.

We sleep in the ore
you smelt for your needs.
You mine our beds
for your raw materials.
We sit at the forge’s door
and gasp at the heat.
You bring out the work
and we hustle to touch it, still warm
from the fire.

Save us, sidewalk
blacksmiths, alchemists
of dark iron.  We’re always
in need of a little steel
and your blacksmith’s marks
upon it.

As much as I’d like to believe
otherwise (in all my explorations
prior to this one
I have believed otherwise)
I am evidently in need
of some constant on which to fall back.

Chaos has at times intrigued me
but only for as long
as I can easily turn it off.
Freefall is linear,
it begins and ends, thus
I love everything about it
but mostly that it begins and ends.

And I love free jazz, it’s true,
but only because somewhere in the best of it
there’s always a sense of journey.

Weekend anarchist, armchair surrealist:
a drug like DMT was made for folks like me —
forty five minutes of shamanic journey,
then back to the office to scorn the mundanes.

So when I listen to this unruly sound
of what might be a theremin crossed maybe with saxophone
and processed through a sampled Charles River flood,
set over distorted readings of a Chinese restaurant menu
and the random tick-tock beat of a windup alarm clock
apparently being spun on a monkey’s middle finger,

I am filled with gratitude and awe
that you thought I’d love this,
and a sense of shame at how I did not.

I don’t know what to do
except thank you,
and then resolve to never tell you

that when it was over,
I reached for my acoustic guitar
and played hard rhythm
4/4 open first position chords
for quite a while afterward.

What you played with, Malcolm, was our long-established expectation.
We had believed we understood the game.  You changed our imagination.

It was not always pretty, whole, or even moral;  you pushed Sid into his grave.
We extracted romance from his shattered sneer and poisoned imagination.

When I heard them first I was transformed. I fell into their distorted arms.
You certainly stood by and cackled at how you’d exceeded your own imagination.

Of course, you did not know me by name, but I’m sure my type was familiar to you.
You counted on the magnet of filth to pull in the starved rock imagination.

You pulled the string, the easy marks danced, we discerned truth from seeing them.
Did selling bondage gear stifle the leap we made past your imagination?

Did you foresee how quickly we’d free ourselves through your grand swindle?
Did you foresee me, or a million Tonys like me, recreating your imagination?

Listen to Sonny Rollins:
specifically,
to a recording he made in Boston
four days after
the World Trade Center fell;

listen,
and try to tell me
you’ll ever want
to eat your gun
ever again.

Through the door of the Ship Room comes
one snapped mental carrot,
one steamrolled nose,
a duffel full of puppets,
and the echo of his scratchy greeting
piercing the room:
with a hearty “yee-yee” and a “ham-ham-ham,” 
the Captain
has arrived.

I’m one of only a few in the club
who know his real name.
I’m not telling.
Here he’s the Captain and
he runs things
by presence
and enthusisam
and chaos, perfect
sweaty chaos.

A band on stage
grinds out bluespunk
and here come the shark
and the pig
out of the bag.  The Captain
slugs and pops
at the front of the crowd
and thrusts them at the singer,
who hasn’t played here before
and has no clue how to react,
but we sure do.  We’re pointing
and moshing like pirates
behind him, the rock and roll
unleashed, now the bassist gets it
and starts to grin, steps up the bottom
as we charge and yell for louder
and more, while the Captain
leads us puppet-handed into
the heart of Saturday night.

Half these kids don’t know what they’re seeing:
the act I’ve known for all these years
still in progress, this stocky little block of a lunatic
for the release of every tense energy ball
in our chests and our feet knows us,
isn’t afraid to lead us to crazy and abandon.

No one would believe me if I told them
anything of what I know of him: how I’ve seen him
tear a computer down and rebuild it
in less time than it takes to power one up;
that in rare moments he quotes Shakespeare;
that under the weed and the acid scars
there’s a guy who once knew more about more things
than most of us could imagine forgetting —
but he’s managed it, for the most part.

Somebody outside the club calls him a retard
and I want to flatten his nose,
tear out his hair, tell him that now
he’s ready to judge him.  The Captain
wouldn’t care, of course, and that holds me back.
A rock and roll army needs its leaders.
Needs the lifers who live it.  Needs the guys
who could care less how they’re seen
by people with healthy metal carrots
and nothing alive in their hands.