Really Alone With You at the Club
Music’s one more way of being alone.
I can’t tell my date what blue is.
I can’t say have you ever lived
in an imaginary city where the unreal people
talk in notes, in scales.
1 can’t flick my fingers at the waiter,
order a plate of clefs, drum solos with two straws.
Sure, I can say remember the beach at dawn
and that long lonely cry of the humpback whale
but I can’t explain how another whale hears it.
Music is a place where you can’t explain anything.
There’s a dictionary but the guitar player has it in his head.
I just sit and feel like a lantern swinging
on the deck of a boat at night
but that image doesn’t last long enough
for my tongue to make connection.
I’m a canal of sloshing water.
I’m the stars seen through the arches of a bridge.
The rain’s stopped on the streets, the blacktop’s glistening.
Moon’s reflecting four beats to the bar.