This is long and weird, but stick it out to the end maybe please? This is an elaborate extended metaphor here . . . i'm thinking about Toni Morrison and I've been reading a lot of gender studies' essays, here's where it gets me. I have been fucked by my drummer I've been fucked by my drummer, slow and hard. Oh, he knows the way of where to place a beat, He knows it slow and hard and smooth, He sets them up on pedestals in clear glass cases He knows that beats are gentle creatures, delicate things that must be handled softly, even when he makes them sound so hard. And I must struggle to hold on, cling to chords, dig my fingers in hard to the skin on the shoulders of A and E and He pulls me forward and I barely know where He is going but I cannot help but keep up. I strike out syncopations against him, I try to draw it out and linger on a note, refuse to move my finger on, please let it linger, He draws me back with a downbeat it circles and wraps itself around me and I am ricocheting between his beats fine, fine, I’ll go with you I’ll do it your way, if you think I can keep up He always waits for an answer. He is so sweet; He makes me laugh with three strikes to a high hat and he wants to know, know how I feel and I, I move against him with arpeggios to say please, please go on. And he rolls with tones of beats so low I feel them vibrate in the brittle bones of my fingers, they rock me back and forth almost symmetrically not quite almost, almost, I teeter on my toes reaching up leaning swaying back and forth catch me, catch me please and we fall together into something steady smooth reliable. I can’t breath and I can’t wait to keep pushing this, Keep pushing this, this tantric dream just Higher just higher! - but we relax, fold, curl up, draw breaths steadily, and he slows and traces a drumstick along the syncopations jolting against my waist (my shins have been severed from my knees where is the ground?) He draws it out and lays it down gently, lovingly and he watches me and we kiss it on the forehead together and we lift our hands back and lift our eyes up to the glory of the hills and the coming of the angels that ought to be splashed out in vibrant colors above us, ah, ah, but it’s the unfinished backroom of a record store, there are broken beer bottles, something sticky on the floor that smells like resin and mildewed carpet. My drummer doesn’t realize he’s fucked me like nobody but his bandmates has done before, and he says he’s got homework to finish after this cigarette Ah, baby don’t go Don’t go don’t forsake me to the hands of the young, The hands of the waiting-their-turn, the amateurs They’ve spent too much time listening to Jefferson Airplane Too much time thrashing their arms about in lonely basements for half hour segments between coming home from school and spaghetti dinner They only know aggression and the cathartic vomit thrash They don’t under stand scales or notes or notes on notes or scales on notes on chords on thirds on flat seventh minors and all in all in time, they couldn’t care less for what I’m trying to say here! Anyway nobody else should listen to what we’ve just made, this is ours, this is ours to leave drifting in the shadows behind amplifiers behind pieces of misplaced plywood; maybe the customers next door if they are lucky will think they feel something muted pulsing through the walls between us and the records but they don’t have to know, they don’t have to know it’s us. And no one else would have the patience to hear the whole thing out anyway, understand it all, two chords is all it is for twenty minutes, more, but it’s like eye contact, no one can see what we’re understanding implicitly, all here in one another’s irises we lock eyes staring down for twenty minutes, fix on two chords and I can hardly stand up. You don’t even have to say hello to me at your shows. I won’t be listening to your band, only your eloquent phrasing, imagining how I would reply, what I might do to you in return, when I might surprise you with a bold touch of flatted thirds shock you push you farther than you thought you wanted to go Pretend you love to play with the boys more, go ahead and thrash out death metal standards because its funny and its fun and you all laugh about how great you are, fine, pretend you love it but when I’m there – baby, give me something new, try anything I trust you something they’ve never heard make it up as you go a long, I promise that I will like it. It can be a secret, but please make it long Please make it hard make it slow make it ours and we can both know that its better than with anybody else.
