A poem from my second book, "Fire Works," 2001, which I swear I'm gonna republish someday soon.
She didn't like it.
lyrics
The Goddamn Exploding Garbagetruck Story
She told me after dinner one cool night
We were drinking in the back room of a cigar bar
And the DJ on his milkcrates was doing all right
And there was no room to dance
But when the first just right bassline started moving through
Her eyes, hands, shoulders, smile and hands
Did a little something to make me tingle
To this day
And my brain was buttered Teflon
Since I was also listening to her eyes, the DJ, my drink
But the story goes kinda like this:
She was, I dunno, eight?
Living with hippie parents on a tofu farm, if you can believe it,
At the end of a West Virginia gravel road
On her way out in the morning with mom to drive her
To school
And the garbage truck was coming in
And, I’m sorry about this, but somehow
It caught fire in the driveway
And, well, sorta blew up.
Naturally
This caused considerable consternation, concern and delay
And I believe there was also some issue about laundry
(Perhaps a clothesline heavy with drying garments
Suddenly fusilladed with smoldering airborne debris?)
But mom took good care of her
And she did get to school
Bearing a mom-written note saying simply,
“Please excuse my daughter’s tardiness today;
The goddamn garbagetruck exploded in our driveway.”
That very night I pledged to write
The Great American Goddamn Exploding Garbagetruck Poem
But half an hour later I’d scrawled a sonnet instead
In a moment of weakness. I’d waited a month, after all,
But she’d been sighing and laughing iambic pentameter at me all evening,
Octets in her eyes, sestets in her step,
So sue me. My pen was engorged, my notebook seduced
Everything just caught fire
And then it exploded
In a senseless sonnet written leaning against a wall
One cool evening in the back room of a crowded cigar bar.
Three months later she taught me to drink beer
(I’m a slow learner about some things)
And at two in the morning on a Baltimore rooftop
I sloppily asked her to recap for me the
Goddamn Exploding Garbagetruck Tale
She was patient but dismissive like a senator at a press conference
Brushing off everything that wasn’t on the agenda
“It’s all very simple,” she muttered, slurring just an adorable bit
“The goddamn garbagetruck blew up
And the teacher said she’d keep that letter forever
And I’d love to go back and have another look at it
But I recently heard that teacher had died
And I’d rather die myself than talk to her asshole son about it.”
And I was so hammered
And she was so tired
She curled up in a little nook right there on the roof
And I plopped down beside her like the ludicrously loyal mutt that I am
And she closed her eyes and I looked up at the trees
Trying to discern the poetry
In a story that came at me like a wave of flying debris
Flaming flotsam and jetsam of a strange girl’s strange childhood
A story only written down immediately, only once, in a mother’s hurried haiku hand
Lost behind a dead teacher’s asshole son
And when I couldn’t find the poem
I was left looking for traces of the girl
Who learned so young in the West Virginia hills
That anything can blow up at any old time
But mommy can handle it, and she’ll write you a note
And as she dozed off beside me under Baltimore stars
I noticed her left sneaker had come undone
My fumbling fingers tied it again
As gently as you’d lift a baby bird back to its nest.
Half awakened she mumbled, “What you’re doing
Is pointless, it makes no sense.”
“Not entirely pointless,” I think I drawled,
“Only ninety-nine percent. And that is
A comfortable enough margin
For me.”
The long-awaited new album from Batida boasts all of the hard-hitting rhythms and jubilant melodies we’ve come to expect. Bandcamp New & Notable Oct 24, 2022
