Rose: Random Poetry

Rosalyn, a longstanding friend of my brother Tom’s stretching back to the dawn of punk rock in New York City, is nearly 70 years old. She continues to front the band she founded with her husband in the mid 1980s. Her travels have taken her far from her adopted home of Manhattan, to places that yielded easily to her curious photographer's eye: Miami, Venice, Cartagena. Then as now, she plays electric guitar with fierceness and fire.

Louisville, KY is Rose's native city. I wrote the following poem/song (where's a guitarist when you need one?) a year after I moved here, in the midst of the ongoing delirium that absorbed thirty-three years of my life. Back then Rose was often on my mind. Her adoring parents who provided her with a rootedness that had been so sorely lacking from my own upbringing; Rose, so certain of herself and true, always, to her talent.

The truth is I felt jealous of her. My hunger for another’s experience grew into an envy that in hindsight was unwarranted and unfair. Rose became the symbol of the life I'd have liked to lead, had my circumstances been different. But it’s like asking to be Patti Smith - a supernova whose path, once charted, can never be duplicated.

The Schizophrenic and the Rose

You, Rose were a young Georgia O’Keeffe
I got tossed from the Titanic and was clinging to a reef
Dreamt of all the lives I’d left unlived
You always gave more than what I ever had to give

I was friendless and hungry so I moved to your town
Made a fool again 
Like going to school again 
Perfect training for this clown
I couldn’t play guitar and I couldn’t 
Play the drums
I stare at the ceiling adding and dividing sums 

Every day I wait for my anticipated birth
Sing to the seamstress from the 4 corners of the earth
Sew me up
Grow me up
I’ve got no roots or desires
Not even children, next of kin
My sacrilegious upbringing 
Taught hunger and hatred for
All that lived within

I hear you screaming Rose and
That’s the point 
Can’t compare to you
Can’t come close
But aren’t you glad that you 
Once knew the younger girl
Who had no clue about anything of 
Importance in the world
All she wanted to do was abandon
Herself to the centrifuge of time
If I’ve left you bleeding then
You're no friend of mine

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