In honor of the mountain goats announcing Jenny from Thebes, here’s a poem i wrote once

Tape Head Cleaner

Wrapped in phosphor bronze,

pulled taut against white oak,

plucked and stricken,

stripping skin from fingers,

this music is a grapefruit spoon.

This music scoops bittersweet flesh,

tightens the tongue,

contracts the muscles in your face.

Sound as physical phenomenon

shakes the smallest parts of your ear,

movement made electric,

rippling out into emotion.

You press the goosebumps back

into your skin, refusing

the spreading shiver of a song

written for you, alone,

driving northwest into the Panhandle,

towards Lubbock, the Llano,

The West, by God! The road smells

like blood and beef and cotton.

Heat bends the asphalt, bends

the twenty one year old Ford

Dutch Oven baking you at

eighty miles per hour.

The song cooking in your throat

was mine. I spoon fed it to you,

once, but now it’s spooling

out of you, plastic film and iron

wrapped in phosphor bronze,

past your wire cutter teeth.

Stop it if you want,

let the music coil in your stomach,

or keep driving into that roiling

mass of memory and summer,

and someday it’ll have been gone

far longer than it ever was.