Posted in Death

Burnt

Posted on by tq1695

While waiting to be famous
the boss still an employee
Bruce Springsteen wrote of his growing up
of New Jersey
the people, the places, the sights and the sounds
the joy and the scars.

Popular culture often transcribes error
Sam wasn’t asked to play it again by Ingrid Bergman
Captain Kirk never ordered Scotty to beam him up
and
Springsteen didn’t call the song youth thought his best, ‘Sandy’.
A British middle of the road band renamed it
disguising sentiment as sentimentality
clothing under boardwalk passion with prim harmonies.
Melodic marketing
avoided wrinkling top 40 brows.

Adolescence yet to know the touch of a woman
prefigured desolation
hearing hypnotic anxiety of lyrics
“ … the waitress I was seein’ lost her desire for me …
… said she won’t set herself on fire for me anymore.”

The zodiac’s prerogative
women and men
learn the impossibility of romance
before the imperishability of love.
The indifference of one
for whom we would set ourselves on fire.

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Author:

Most of my life has been spent on the bench, occasionally called into the game by extravagance or attenuation. Waiting has turned a loner into a recorder - nondescript and inconsequential, more not noticed than overlooked - the non-vantage point of children not yet considered old enough to understand. Orphaned Islands (Un)poetry is a lifetime of picking anecdotes up and not throwing them away. Stories collected like odds and ends placed in a box in the basement, the garage, the garden shed - uncertain as to what their use might be but knowing that one day there might be one.