The first thing is the afferent guitar
piercing the smoked haze
in a ripping staccato carbine of notes and steel
that seems to shrill in wounded dissonance,
until you see him upon stage,
face grimacing,
hunched in a sweat fever,
transformed into some obsessive savant,
his creased fingers scaling frets
in a delirious, frenzied blur,
holding desperately to a tethered line
into the abyss of tortured souls.
And, the etched black face, of say sixty,
reaches out in a yawping bellow
like the arousal from an epileptic episode,
slowly at first, unsure of where he’s been,
then finding rhythm, awareness,
then finally the glint in his eye of connection,
his blues the resignation of life so far lived.
And, the forty odd people, like me,
sitting at stools, at tables,
emptying beer in medicated doses,
marvel in a detached way
to an escaping thought,
of being up there alongside him,
ourselves ripping a few therapeutic chords,
in a suppressed pensive levitation.
As he tomahawks his Stratocaster in fitting finality,
we rise in applause, whooping and hollering,
perfect to the final tick toward New Year’s,
comfortably numb in our resoluteness’,
reaching deep within our souls, perhaps too deep
from these watery depths
into the rose colored light of dawn.
- Mark Trubisky
Copyright © 2002 Yellow Brick Road Gallery. All
rights reserved in pictorial or written representation.
Revised: 01/07/06.