THE GRUESOME GET-DOWN
"Speak King's English!" sez the Narrator. He is wrapped in fine muslins and is blind as an oyster.
He is speaking from a transistor radio. He is
our next-to-best shepherd, he retains that faint,
hot-sand glow of a prophet, or a forgotten, two-bit sultan.
He gets paid by the hour to wear that thing on his head.
He is evangelical, or at least that's what it said on his calling card.
He operates out of the dead sea, out of the late-night static waves we clutch to our ears like a conch shell as we shuck and jive over a municipal bridge at 2 AM, wishing we had our own music.
Why do you insist on listening to that son of a bitch?
We could have that much more silence if we counted him out.
As it is, we do the dance of the forty-ounce, hump the city's hypodermic sky-line, think of pigeons as doves and list the automobile as this country's best approximation of the slaughtered lamb. I think we turned too-old just yesterday. I can't even pretend I've got anything left to rebel against. Just this dirty music of the forked-tongue and knife set,
the shine stolen from the glaringly obvious,
the salt poured from the salt mines onto old wounds; anything to keep them in business.
I come from a region where it's all right to hate yourself.
I drive the highway, looking for another happy accident.
There are a thousand songs that could be labeled appropriate for this occasion, but I'm giving up the safety net.
I've played the juke-box like a gas pump, and now I'm asking
for one, just one, just a straight-up, mournful melody
to call my own, just anything to drown out the Narrator
who's telling me this one's already been sung.