Sinking Ship
SINKING SHIP
You are the engine. You fuel the train so it keeps rollin’. It may have been a long time since you rock and rolled, but you rock the hardest. You are the heartbeat, the pounding insistence that brings it on. You are the pistons pushing my car, delivering that perfect mix between motion and FM radio.
You taught me the power of drums and that pounding those motherfuckers pounds the very heart into rock n roll. Slam. Thump. Rat-a-tat. Building to a crescendo so volatile, so full of life that it could kill us with its fury. You were playing the soundtrack in my head when I sat behind a full set of drums at age fifteen and learned how to tap my foot on the bass drum following the beat of my heart as my young hands gripped a set up drumsticks and lashed out rapid fire at drums and cymbals and came down to the cool long kiss on the snare before the next round of pounding kicked in. It was like fucking without fucking. Pounding. Beating. Sweating. Flailing. Breathing. Hard, fast, harder, faster, and then slowing down to a long slow drip.
You taught me how to listen to behind the music. The insistence of percussion. Demanding through its beating heart. Live. Live. Live. Speed up. Slow down. Gasp in the space between beats. And you did live, my drumming man. You lived hard as you drummed, my fucked up man. My man never seen, always hidden behind a set of drums, but you were definitely heard. Your heart beating now as I peck at the keyboard.
Maybe I should call you Ahab. Your iconic performance is named after a giant whale that brought down the obsessive man down who hunted it. A whale shaped like the zeppelin you rode in as you hunted the goods that rock n roll could deliver. You sailed through a sea of drugs, booze and power chords, until like a doomed zeppelin, you crashed and burned. Not in a flurry of flames and explosions like the music you played. But the quiet death of a sinking ship. Breath slowly seeping. Drowning. Silenced. So much quieter than the pounding legacy you left behind.