bishop danced (1976)
She’s telling me we like the “live recordings” the best and I am nodding my head in agreement. I am always in agreement nodding off but too scared to sleep, in the backseat of someone’s car.
A man- maybe one I love or adore, tells me that someone wrote a whole book about the song “Spirit in the Night” and it is April and I am tired. Oh you don’t know what they can do to ya. I like that the same names are used again and again. I said “I hurt” she said honey let me heal it. And what good did it do? To write that book? That I will not read in April.
Every year it blows my mind that April actually comes. Every year I can’t memorize the poem (to which there is no live version of) Are the lilacs breeding or are they mixing? Is it the Hanged Man that I cannot see or that I should fear?
In New York it’s all trains and paid drivers. The live recordings don’t make a difference. Someone tells me that “that is the ocean” and I tell someone that they are “a liar.”
She looks back in conformation “the live version- it’s better- it’s a million times better than any of this shit.”
And me, I listen.