POEM: Musician

You don’t have to be a trainspotter.
Count Basie wasn’t a real count

He claims to be a textualist at heart.
Songs are just an emotional anchor.

In the Joe Loss Orchestra,
I’m a secret lemonade drinker.

If he could find a piano here he would play it with his toes until the girls
All take their clothes off.
Only two things matter: revenge and guilt.

It’s the lash and rum sodomy.
About love and lust, infidelity and betrayal
And all the tawdry pleasures and difficulties that arise out of them.

“It’s too bad for people who want to know, ‘cause they ain’t gonna know.
Songs don’t tell the truth.”

I’d bind his e-mails and give them to his publisher.

He’s tried to learn how to do it.
How to keep moving
Not out of perversity
Or some desire to impress

Avatar of English punk.
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

His mind works a bit like one of those impossibly complicated
Pentagon PowerPoint presentations.

Music is more like water than a rhinoceros.
It doesn’t charge madly down one path.
It runs away in every direction.

It’s taking a long time to die, like big things do.
Believe me, it will remake itself.