A little rock n’ roll, a little death….

Anniversary Song

When I closed the shades,
I didn’t expect you’d die,
but die you did–

die, die, my darling,
you sang to yourself,
the sheet music of pain
scattered about your apartment
and the lot of us illiterate
to its language, the one girl
who might have helped,
who had a good ear for it–

could pick out a tune of agony
and reproduce it with panache–

her head was up somewhere
in the good clouds and didn’t bother
looking down or around,
the music of the spheres proving
too much for her, commanding
her attention with a secret hush-hush
show heaven had been talking about for ages…

…but you went, didn’t you?
Urged the drummer to launch
into “When the Levee Breaks,”
confusing the angelic host but getting
the demonic hoard up and moving quite nicely,
all together now, all you need is hate. Hate, hate, hate…

You once prayed to John Lennon to save you,
but Lennon couldn’t save himself,
couldn’t even so much as float a fucking feather
across the room, so he’s out of the deity-running.
Who else did you pray to? Blue Oyster Cult, as best I remember,
who weren’t so much down with suicide as they were
about making money and smoking a metric ton of weed,
getting high as an elephant’s eye and floating
down the River Styx without oars and hoping for the best.