the first barbed, bass offset, guitar chords
the first barbed, bass offset, guitar chords
of james’s “laid”
resonate inside my head, like a music box’s plucked tines,
every time the life inside me’s mine
like it was in the days when “laid” played
on the radio every hour,
during the last half of twelfth grade
and the fall of my freshman year
of college, when the cusp of innocence
and adulthood ―
adult freedom and adult responsibility,
but without the disillusionment
of experience ― cut my life like a stylus
and made it mine.
now it takes isolated autistic moments
of contextlessness
to make this happen, to dispel the sense
that my life’s bankrupt of promise
and will not yield satisfaction,
as it did when I was young,
no matter what ― no, now to make it mine I must
remove it from my mind
like I do the percussive fusillade that follows
the initial chords of that song,
editing out everything but the anticipation
and training myself
to hear it again and again, like links in a chain,
when things are going well.