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 I made it mine.

now it takes isolated autistic moments

of contexlessness

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.