"Elderberries and dandelions: an old story of what ripens, what scatters and what fades to grey and disappears. The spirit of those artists who understood that music is never just sound, it’s a life, a history, and a haunting."
- Poet
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A diesel generator drowns out the rusted Marshall stack Six years we owned the Billboard charts; the DJ who crowned us every summer for five straight years— this week, a county fair; tonight, the Music Pier. The drummer tapes two split fingers closes his hand once hard— then rests the sticks by Mick’s ashes in a Folgers Black Silk can behind the kit Tommy’s gold sequins snag on his dialysis catheter as he sits Johnnie the P-bassist drags a stool onstage to ease his neuropathy We are crushed elderberries hawking CDs from a card table, bleeding a dark, tart stain onto ninety aluminum chairs No teenagers weep; a man wipes funnel-cake grease from his chin As I tune the cherry-red '57 Stratocaster down a minor third, hoarse from pushing air through a throat scraped thick with scar tissue We were a dense, golden field beneath the studio lights on Midnight Special Now plucked dandelion crowns scatter over Ferris wheel blacktop, leaving white ghost-tufts snagged in the Music Pier’s boardwalk planks Where just three bald stems plug into the seaside damp— and the seeds drift past the shoreline, washed up, vanishing into the deep we used to call home
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