I’m considering doing something a bit different with this poem and perhaps others. I want to record me reading it, add some sound effects, and some music. I don’t know how it will turn out, but I’ll post it on Soundcloud when I finish. Maybe I’ll do the same for some stories I’m working on.

Here and There

Here are the open mouths,
gaping like nightmare fish–
here are the Spanish women,
lost in deft translation,
forgetting the original tongue.

Here are the long-lost vacuum
tubes of black amplifiers left
on my father’s stage the night
he winged in for a one-man
sobbing show that Rolling Stone’s
ghost editor called, “Incomprehensibly
terrible, yet savage in its beauty,”
despite an out-of-tune Fender
and a water-logged microphone.

Here I am, thirty years later,
controlling my anger by remote,
and you are still somewhere
in the immortal ether of music,
drunk on old applause, clinging
to a ratty velvet curtain, vowing
to never let go again.