Come. Come, stay awhile. A little diversion, you have time enough for that, right? I know you’re very busy in your gray suits, black shoes, white faces. I hear the tap-tap of your shoes and the tick-tock of your pendulum briefcase and I can feel the aura of too busy and see the cloud of it that swirls and roils among your crowd.
The cloud is gray, your clothes are
gray, this whole city’s gray. The sidewalk, the pigeons, your eyes…
You know what you need? You need a
diversion, a distraction, a daydream. I can give it all—just, stay awhile. Let
me work.
I know—you’re busy. You have
colleagues and clientele and a reputation to appease; I can almost hear the
groupthink that darts like lightning, zigzag, through the neuron cloud: Stay with the herd, do not stray, do not
show weakness. But I will ask you something else; I will urge you to stray.
I am no wolf, I promise you, I am not even a sheep, black or white or gray.
No, I’m certainly not a sheep.
Certainly not gray. When you see me on the corner—you do not look, make an effort not to look, but I know that
means you see me—you can see the crumpled rainbow a stork dropped from heaven
(for that is where we come from, you and me and all of us together).
When I was little, I think, I used to be very
particular about my clothes—the colors had to match my refined palette just so,
but that was only a dream, and Mom dressed me in whatever she could pull from
the clearance racks before I started to raise a fit. And I dressed in the gaudy
clothes and went to school and did not die from embarrassment like I screamed I
would, and now the garish Goodwill clothes I buy with the money I manage to scrape
together do not seem so offensive. I sacrificed my pride for this that’s in my
hands...
Yes, you tilt your noses up and,
sniffing, you follow the faint, elusive scent of success, poised like fish in a
tank to snatch up whatever morsel may drift your way. And at each passing
school of you, I cast my own lines in measures of six strings and see what I
can reel to the surface and the light.
I was born with the soul of a poet without the ability to write. I couldn’t write in elementary school, couldn’t write in high school, and I did my time and learned my capitals of South America and periodic elements and czars of Russia, but I couldn’t write, so I never got a scholarship. I knew the words and the clever turns of phrases and the difference between an iamb and a trochee, but the only poetry and dialogue and discourse I could produce came not from a scritch-scratch pen but a hallelujah guitar.
Come. Come, stay awhile. Listen to
my poetry. We all need a distraction. Give your shiny shoes a break from
slapping, tapping on the pavement—I don’t need a drum. Just need an audience, spare
change if you got it, God bless you, sir.
It’s starting to drizzle, I know—I
know you can’t risk the rain drip-dropping away the chemicals in your hair.
Your fancy suits and tick-tock watches can’t handle the moisture change. I see
your lips moving, cursing the weatherman who promised you on your flat screen,
widescreen TV it would be sunny. I woke this morning and looked up and the
clouds told me otherwise, so I sat under an overhang with my guitar and I
sing and strum to drown out the pitter-patter. If you can forget the rain, are
you still wet? (I’ll tell you—only after the spell’s been broken. Then you’re
wetter than you started.)
Ah! There’s a tug. Come. Come, stay awhile. You have your umbrella and
I have mine and together we can have a daydream of sunshine, right? Your eyes
aren’t quite so gray; you know what I mean. You know the secret. Your fingers
are twitching in time with mine—you got a couple of them wrong, but that’s
okay; your muscle memory’s taking over, helping your fingers remember the
chords. You’re a little slow, but that’s okay; your brain is remembering to interpret again.
And I sing and I weave a thread of
unvoiced musings out of six old strings, then someone bumps into you and
reminds you that you’re too busy
and have somewhere to be with that fancy watch and briefcase of yours. The
sound of the tick-tock steadily clicks and crescendos until you cannot hear my
music anymore. You glance at your watch in apology and move to go.
I just watch you turn and wish the rain would
bleed my rainbow onto the city and into your eyes, and I fumble a chord because
I know it never will, and I’ve known that for a long time. But this is just a
diversion and a distraction and a daydream. And of course I say none of this to
you because I am only speaking through my music and all the words you hear are
your own and what you think I mean.
Clink.
Clinkclinkclink. Clunk. …Shufflerustle… Paff.
“’Ank y’sir.”
D Major.
No comments:
Post a Comment