poem of the day 07.16.15

sonic youth

i won’t lie

back then the muse

was pretty slow in coming to me

i grew up in a neighborhood

where all of the kids listened to rap

dressed like rap stars and tried to prep the role

by adding that ghetto inflection

to their suburban drawls

now everybody does it these days

white rappers, the spawn of rich white actors

are online justifying their use of the word nigga

but back then it was penetratingly dull

to be around this even if it was new

it felt hollow and unearned

i got a job closer to the city

that kept me out of my neighborhood more and more

the people i worked with painted

or drew comics, or made some other kind of art

a lot of them were in bands

they made me mixed tapes with the kind of stuff

i’d never heard before

bands that put on scream shows

or jangled low guitars that felt like the sunset

some of it was bad some of it was good

the point was that it was different

it was a coming of age story, i guess

but i remember one time

riding around with my old neighborhood friends

we were going for pizza

or to kill another night

at the chain diner we all went too

someone would hit on the waitress

someone would spike calvin’s coffee with salt

someone’s ex-girlfriend would show up

with her new boyfriend on a leash

and as we rode off toward

the same exact night that we had last week

i put on one of my new mixed tapes

let the haze of sound fill the car

thinking that i was taking us all

into a bold, new direction that we could share

when one of my friends

ripped the tape out of the deck

he tossed it in the back seat

and put on the same old same old

something with a beat

enough bass to poison a neighborhood

and finally whatever else

had kept me tied up

to that time and place.