IN THE EARLY FALL OF 1978 BILLY JOEL BECOMES MY LORD AND SAVIOR
There is the job, the first, after months of joblessness
the one-night stand in a factory pumping
plastic gunk through extruders, sliding across
pools of plastic spillage meant for cheap-assed toys
in a five-and-dimes, but breaking the machines,
(Prosecutable Destruction Of Company Property!)
on purpose so you can grab a smoke outside.
Ruin is rising like Pickman's model from the sewer:
the spectre of moving in with the wife's parents,
110 miles from New York, walking a colicky new baby
across the creaking floor at 3 AM, renouncing
all hope and I who entered there.
For Eastern Long Island is a wilderness: it is James Wright's
Bridgeport, Ohio, with a stink of dead fish,
a cemetery of saloons and stock cars.
Lobstermen drive drunk and docks fall into the water
at the first sign of a bad storm. If I accept my fate,
I hear myself outcry, I might just as well accept life
as the wife of a gay Dracula who lives only to violate me
body and soul.
cVomes the miracle at the middle of the journey
of my life: the aNewark Star-Ledger and a job
I am able to obtain just by coming in sober and
without an attitude lower or higher than desperation:
for the Circulation Manager is about to fire
his dopehead dim-bulb Assistant, and he hires me
to be It in the last guy's place.
Seven days a week, a de Chirico landscape
of For Keeps: meet the truck, go home Sundays at 5 AM.
The rest of the time drive an unfilled route
over the back roads between Butler and Boonton, NJ.
It is that darkness that draws me back again and again
to this moment over 30 years, felt now forever.
The car radio, AM only, plays Billy Joel at 4 AM.
Out of the car, taking a leak in total darkness,
I think God I am not a woman, and even so,
there is Billy telling me he loves me just the way I am,
or to someone to get out of my life and leave me alone.
Black sky of stars, the million points of light.
A lie.
Not darkest before the dawn except on the Mayan calender.
Instead the beginning of darkness, relieved
only for this first time by the vanity of hope
the prayer that this will be the worst
and that the Piano Man will lead me through
the worst of time by the light glowing from within,
the black keys shining like a beam.
KTW/5-17-09
--
Ken Wolman http://awfulrowing.wordpress.com/ http://www.petsit.com/content317832.html
---------------------------------
"All writers are hunters, and parents are the most available prey."--Francine du Plessix Gray
|