Silly Love Songs

 

In 1985 I was in college
Living in a basement dorm room
That my roommate
A punk rocker
From Gainesville Florida
Called the Hellhole
The third roommate spent his days
With enormous headphones
Plugged into a radio broadcasting news reports
From an AM station in New Hampshire
We didn't know who lived aboveground
Or if anybody did
One night bass guitar frequencies
Began transmitting through the floorboards
And into the Hellhole
The notes appeared
As thick black sonic tires
Bouncing around the Hellhole
Ricocheting rolling plopping
The force of the notes was such
That nothing else could be heard
The notes said:
Dee dee doot dee do da di da doot dee do
In a tumbling inevitable way
They were insistent relentless
I listened beyond the bouncing tire notes
And detected a Liverpool voice
"What's wrong with that?"
The torrent of Rickenbacker hail
Issued forth in the early morning
In the afternoon at night
And from the movement of the feet
Across the floor upstairs
It sounded like a good time every time

The Times, The Changes

Die Kruezen, Cement - cassette, car stereo, blue Chevy Caprice

Meat Puppets II - blue Memorex cassette, boombox, driveway behind family house

Beatles "blue" double album - blue vinyl, grade school bedroom

Happiness Is Being with the Spinners - 8-track, car stereo, cream colored Cadillac convertible

Pell Mell, Flow - CD, boombox, bedroom third floor of family house

Butthole Surfers, Locust Abortion Technician - vinyl, Portland, Maine, roommate Matt's room

Pixies, Surfer Rosa - Portland, Maine, Brackett St., living room, music played from an upstairs bedroom, source unknown

Miles Davis, Big Fun - vinyl, Bart or Joe's dorm room

The Harder They Come soundtrack - vinyl, Zach’s house, living room

Cesaria Evora (eponymous) - CD, store sound system, Tower Records, Chicago Loop

Neil Young, Decade; Bob Dylan, Infidels; REM, Murmur - vinyl, in a room we never named, family house

Running Fence

 

In Junior High

When I went
To my best friend's house
To sit on the puffy orange
Corduroy couch
And listen
To Cheap Trick records
We would pick up a book
Off the coffee table
And leaf through it
Kind of enjoying it
Not really understanding it
It was oddly shaped
With an off-white cover
Made out of some
Sort of textured material
Inside were photos of a fence
Stretching across hill
After hill after hill
And through meadows
And across the sides of mountains
And the fence didn't seem
To serve any purpose
It was made of mere fabric
White glossy textured fabric
Tethered to steel poles
Stuck in the ground
Winding through miles
Of western landscapes
I was indifferent or confused
By this book
But I kept on looking at it
Visit after visit
There was wind across that land
Sun pounding down on the fence
One day I chanced to look at
The inside of the back cover
Tucked into a pocket
Was a piece of the fabric
Seen in the pictures of the fence
I felt one step closer to it

Sometimes

sometimes i really
miss the late night
cable access
political talk shows
arts talk shows
of the 1980s
the creaky sets
the off rack suits
the audio problems
the Q & A tinged with nerves
because you knew they were in it
in it for the love
in it for the dream
in it for the beauty

of those moments