ODES TO ROCK 'N ROLL
FOR JOHN LENNON AND THE BEATLES
Beatles music can make me very angry
“Eleanor Rigby” is soft and sweet and stoically all alone
And “Hey, you’ve go to hide your love a way”
Is a gay man before Stonewall
And if you slander their melancholy majesty
I’ll bust every bone in your beautiful body
When I listened to Lennon’s manifold pronunciations of the word, “Oh”
So coy, so cute, so coquettishly ensconced in a Sergeant’s suit of silk
And every sweet syllable was manna, mothers’ milk
A clarion call and antidote to politics, war and filth
When his sweetness insinuated itself into our legs and loins
We danced to take a chance and fashion our romance
From head, heart and black coal soul to our thumping groins
We glanced upon the fifties with sarcasm like a lance
When I knew I was his brother, his chaste lover, his main man
We donned the rings of Diamonds of Lucy in the Skies
We discarded all the flotsam of the useless alibis
We brought heaven down to earth and were the greatest guys
I took an effervescent acid trip to the Heart of Darkness
Marveling in the many transmuted into one
The throngs of loving laughter reduced to utter death
And I am lost and all alone, for now and ever after
ALL HAIL HIS MAJESTY, LITTLE MICKY JAGGER
Rubied in the Tuesdays, the black and purple pouts
Imbibing illicit elixirs in copious amounts
Preening and screaming and annihilating doubts
Jagger’s on a roll, his army charging, routs
All is red and purple, violent violet hues
The beat is hard and driving, the energy accrues
The mass is in mayhem, Pentecostals in pews
Reveling in vibrant, immoral avenues
He wears scarfs of scarlet, rampaging on the stage
Exuding and extruding, a manic, joyous rage
He burns with a fever you cannot hope to gauge
From this warlock’s spell, you cannot disengage
His Sister is Morphine, his cousin is cocaine
When he speaks he scowls with eminent disdain
His hair’s a black flower that does not need the rain
Belittling the sun, the plenitude of the plain
His legs come from a cheetah or another feral beast
Velocity and vim are always waxed, increased
When he strides he rises, as certainly as yeast
He dances like a shaman, an animistic priest
He has all the grandeur of a brilliant British Lord
Ruling with arrogance over the galling horde
His breeches are stunning, his form is adored
The teeming teenage girls, are mesmerized and floored
The concert is a mass, the guitar is a scepter
The music a liturgy of the adolescent sector
The stereo, a prayer book, for the pious collector
And Jagger, a madman, for a time our lord and master
HOW ROCK AND ROLL WAS MORE EFFECTIVE THAN AVANT GARDE POETS
Oh Lennon, Oh Jagger, you held your microphone
Like a bullhorn at an Anti-War rally
Allen Ginsberg thought he’d levitate the Pentagon
And of course he never came close
But Jagger set a match to gasoline
He raved and ranted with beauty and grace
His Muddy Waters seemed pristine
He sang of sins without disgrace
And railed and wailed against the King
Lyndon Johnson, apostle of war
His poisoned darts knew how to sting
And savage and ravage a beastly Boor
Lennon was Lenin, love and peace
He brandished a guitar and felled a State
And I will never, ever, cease
To wail before his wilted estate
And Lennon sang an Ode to Marx
The brothers, the wit, the welcome love
His poems contrived of whims and larks
He knew there was no heaven above
They live forever in our minds
Like Whitehead’s immortality
Their clarion call always reminds:
Rebel and rage at tyranny
(This ending is terrible. The reference to Whitehead, although very important to me, will strike others as the height of pseudo intellectual horseshit. The last two lines seem too much like cliches)
IT’S ONLY ROCK N ROLL BUT I LIKE IT
I don’t know chords
But Composers are my lords
Sound waves pierce my floorboards
Damn the noise I abhor
I hear colors, touch the timbre
A wailing voice is moss but meeker
The highest note is a violet flicker
A stunning, savage strange elixir
A husky voice is bark on branch
Blood loss stopped, surely stanched
Ills that came as an avalanche
Will wane and whither and come to blanch
IN THIS AURAL HABITAT
WHERE DIVINE TRANSMUTES TO LIVING FACT
A SINGER’S A SAVIOR WITHOUT A TRACT
THE METAPHOR’S TRUE AND SO EXACT
From the medieval dark deep dirge
To the Puritan’s luckless purge
There’s been an overarching urge
To wield the sound and sing and surge
The guitar weeps as Harrison said
And in my mind he’s never dead
Shout-out silence, stuff of dread
The Songs reverberate in my head
ON YOKO ONO
The Yoke and the Onus
Of Yoko and Ono
Oh No, Oh No
The dragon lady perched
On the Dakota
Her webbed feet implanted in the window sills
Of Leonard Bernstein and Barbara Streisand
Demanding their obeisance
She was a giant louse
She Sucked the blood from John’s pubes
And by demonic transubstantiation
Made the sprightly chords of “And Your Bird Can Sing”
Devolve into the preachiness of John’s later work
She gave us art that smelled like over-priced cheese
Like a stuffy poetry reading with an ever-present anal aroma
Of persnickety, farting women dressing art in pinafores and curlers
With only a little acid
Her black hair and beret
Made her fashionably artistic
Like Diane Keaton in “Sleeper”
Writing poetry and Greeting Cards
Alternatively, she was an aged Monica Lewinsky
Impeaching the Beatles and screaming arias in the name of
Her black and heavy Menstrual blood
She sang like a speed freak
And told us we heard astral angels
She smashed through the octives
And witched the Occident to death
DAVID BOWIE, RECONSIDERED
His face was severe
Funereal and pretty
Like a cherub in a charnel house
Like an aborted fetus at a Truman Capote ball
He deconstructed sex
Adonis and Venus
Became lifeless mannequins
Dumbstruck, mutilated, manageable
Breasts as formless fat
The penis a puny string bean
His “spiderman” sophistry
Sucked us up into his mind
And spat us on the ground
We were burnt, strung-out and broke on the gutter
As bright limousines splashed muddy water on our trendy threads
He was our cannibal
Engorging on our compassion
You could hear our dead selves whimper in his sweetest songs
I think I am the teenager in “Life on Mars”
“Hooked to the silver screen”
To a dream of love and guts and fun
But Bowie smirked and sauntered with the spikiest sarcasm
His sculpted English syllables stabbed like a Prussian Helmut
He was the sardonic rebuttal to the Sixties
He kicked us in the balls and said all love is illusion.
You taught us: Major Tom is a drunk
And your “diamond dogs”
(Deliciously degenerate beasts who gave sex the omnipresent odor
of alcohol and the operating room)
Prefigured AIDS
When I was seventeen
I heard you sing, on “Station to Station,”
“I’ll reject you first”
I followed your advice
I wish I had never heard those words
I WANTED TO BE…
I wanted to be as hard and as beautiful as a diamond
All piston pumping penis and big curvaceous ass
Illegitimacy in the tightest pants
A shaman, a braggart, Mick Jagger to the last
The pouting lips part like the petals of a flower
My mouth swoops in with resurrecting power
Though all the ghouls would glower
I sup on the sex sweet and so sour
But the rusted nails of feudal law divvy the lands of David
Beaten by Goliath, Golgotha and Goyim
I feel as if I had wept by the waters of Babylon
I wanted to prance like a prince in feathers and leathers
But I am eternally the Jew
By body grows stooped and ugly and gray
I cough like dusty old holy books
My skin as yellow as a page printed in Poland
Long before the War
MUSIC HISTORY, FROM BEETHOVEN TO MICHAEL JACKSON
Note: Inspired by Lionel Trilling’s observation that far right politics and aesthetic excellence are, somehow, positively correlated.
When I listen to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Fourth Movement
I think that anyone who likes Michael Jackson
Should be shot
Glowing glory of a Deaf Cerebrum
Heard the sounds through an angel’s ear
Exacting Astral awed equations
Every note is sparkling clear
The finest haute perfection prized
The bulbous boat of noise capsized
The keenest minds are energized
We pierce the stratospheric binds
Brilliantly we soar in space
Rivaling heaven’s grace
God so proud we dare displace
We are the Aryan master race
But waves of plagues will befall
That nation so Neanderthal
That thought it heard the voice and call
But only heard Herr Hitler brawl
David Gottfried copyright 2002 to 2020
Wow. Those are quite the body of work. Some of that should be set to music. Thank you!