Music

[heslopian]

I wish I could play the guitar.
Then I could sing you what I've been trying to say
all these years in sloppy free verse,
as the strumming of the strings

reinforces each line and covers my lapses
in eloquence, the times when my neurosis
demands a thousand adjectives, so a table
cannot just be a table, but must be a

threatening or seductive table.
From the bark of my thoughts I would carve for you
lullabies about my mother,
not only stripping her for you and my creative ego

but weaving her into tapestries of sound,
where she would rest, a bright figure,
with a gollywog smile and Russian doll intricacy
beside her successor, my dad's second wife,

the drowned woman staring always at the sun.
And how we would laugh over steaming coffees
as some political fellow recites a poem about the war,
my guitar leaning against my chair and facing

him while he prattles on. The strap would be frayed
where it meets my neck and I would play for pennies
on street corners, not because I need
the money but just for the experience.

Music has always seemed so pure,
and me a jezabel in a monkhouse
completely ignorant of how to play it,
expressing my sin through random and silent line breaks.