Can a song be so sad it becomes beautiful?
A record listened to with such incessance
Its needle scratches and wobbles
Becomes desperate new notes for the melody?
The song unrecognizable to the listener
Without its own personalized warp
From a thousand roundabout journeys?
Try
Hurrah For The Riff Raff’s Good Time Blues (An Outlaw’s Lament)
Or their Ogallala
Try on Steve Earle’s Last Words
Or St. Vincent’s Smoking Section
All these songs make me turn my head
And cry
When I’m around others
Otherwise if I’m all alone
I stare ahead in stoned silence
No Expectations is another
Mick and Keith say that day in the studio
Was the last time
They ever saw blurry-eyed original Brian Jones
Alive
Bent over his guitar with his steel finger slide
Finding and gliding his long long regrets
Up and down his bent strings
As the boy watched his peace of mind packed up
For the last time
Adding his own final warped words
From a piece of steel to carved hollow wood
His swan song for the Stones
That Keith and Mick thought they wrote
Made his own
Immortal
And beautiful.
Millay Has Her Way with a Vassar Professor
by Michael R. Burch
After a night of hard drinking and spreading her legs,
Millay hits the dorm, where the Vassar don begs:
“Please act more chastely, more discretely, more seemly!”
(His name, let’s assume, was, er . . . Percival Queemly.)
“Expel me! Expel me!”?She flashes her eyes.
“Oh! Please! No! I couldn’t! That wouldn’t be wise,
for a great banished Shelley would tarnish my name . . .
Eek! My game will be lame if I can’t milque your fame!”
“Continue to live here?carouse as you please!”
the beleaguered don sighs as he sags to his knees.
Millay grinds her crotch half an inch from his nose:
“I can live in your hellhole, strange man, I suppose ...
but the price is your firstborn, whom I’ll sacrifice to Moloch.”
(Which explains what became of pale Percy’s son, Enoch.)
In Homage to Edna St Vincent Millay
To gaze upon truth is to look upon beauty bare,
Though few have done so save those who walk
The halls of academe, and speak with nature in
Its nakedness. We, we such souls who wander in
The wilderness of life, lost, anxious, low in mood,
Beset with this concern, and that conflict,
We have our own truths. That distant footfall
Of sandal on stone is but an echo far away,
Lost within the clamour of our thoughts.
Truth is the silence that follows our plea
Thrown into the aether, or countless rejection
Of casual offers of close engagement. Truth
Is the cold realisation of life taking this rocky path,
Rather than that gold paved avenue to paradise.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Not choosy about person's sex when she played
Nor age of the person with whom she lay
However, her poetry brightens my day
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