Easter morning my room smells of brandy-sweat.

Tony says that when you get older, it’s hard to still rock and roll. There are exceptions, of course. The man’s over 100 and he’s blazing all over the country, interviewing Metallica, rumping and rolling with cheerleaders. He’s probably got a secret stock-car that he uses to jump on da scrape during his midnight drifts.

There are certain virtues to rock and roll when you’re a creative person. They’re basically the exact same virtues of doing something really stupid and then writing about it later.  To other misfortunate people–your audience–it makes you almost pious.  Polishing off a bottle of hard liquor and then drawing a sword on a girl that you’re interested in just so she knows your passion is the lesser road to veneration.

 Proper people need proper idols.  I too love the elephant-headed gods that walk beside the holy, the Jesus (whoever he was), the Tathāgata (whether he’s coming or going), the Madonna, agios Demeter, and all the untouchable men and women that can die and then come back.  (That’s my tequila trick, and I’ve been phosophorescent ever since.)

Perhaps telling of my propriety, I’m more likely to be found in a bar than in a church.  I say my prayers phoetal and shivering, and I find my words in the sad eyes of the people I see passing through the night.  There is more there in the shriveled faces of dying men and forgotten women than in every religious trinket, than in the violent trembling of any minister’s voice, than in every chorus of Hallelujah.  At 3AM, the empty streets and how they always threaten to snap from loneliness are far more revealing than scripture.  In mutual bad faith, I’ll tell you that I pretend to be a bad man with a saint’s heart.

A rare shot of the elusive Fitzgerald in captivity.

Tony also said: “the deeper well is in the blues, not in prog rock.”  And while I play with engineers and physicists, my closest comrades are blues players that string their guitars with their guts.  They are very close to rock and roll, the pulse of the everycat.  They wear the musk of their habits and the scars of their fun.  

One such person is the fabulous Mr. Green, soi-disant inventor of radio-wave mind control.  With his electric tongue he keeps the friction in the clouds high, and the air breathing heavy all night.  He lets me borrow his pedestal, the Smokin’ Word, to make holy the widows and cheats.  He’s a man that knows rock and roll and bluesy adultery.  I can’t see it dying with age.

Last night I tore through the show for four and a half hours.  I spit religious to taxi drivers and party-goers.  I complain about nature poems, and shit over everything.  My poems, I think, want to let loose into rock and roll.  They want to tear the world asunder, then venerate the rubble.  They aren’t happy as poems.  They want to be swords.  They want to kill and revive, using your bones as a whetstone, waltzing so sharp through your mind and your flesh.  It’s strangely hypnotic, religious, erotic, and I only know one word from church.

Amen.