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MIKE BOYLE
Rock star found dead i am in a small recording studio on e 10th st playing a lime green stratocaster that isn't mine. the room is crowded but i only know 2 of the people; one is nick on bass and the other is nigel playing sax & blues harps. my skin is stretched tight, i'm a sail and the boat is moving. i'm a lampshade. it's not much of a studio, more like a $10 an hour rehersal room w/ a tape deck, mixer & some ambient mics & i have been away for a while, almost a year. there's a drummer nick found somewhere & we run through some of the old songs to warm up & then nick has some new ones & so do i, we've got notebooks full of stuff & it doesn't take long till we're playing through them & then nick says he heard this song in the bahamas, said, sly & robbie wrote it & it wasn't on any record but he heard the tape when he was visiting his friend who was an engineer at compass point, a studio down there. i knew the engineer, used to live in nyc, had a surfboard, said he would take the train to rockaway with the board & i had asked at the time, don't people look at you funny? & he said, it's new york man, people don't look at you, well that was a couple of years earlier when i was new to the city. we ran through the song that ended with the rock star found dead line, a sortid tale of a local boy gone bad. you like it don't you? nick asked. oh, yeah. i knew you would, he said. the people in the room clap & the guy that runs the place gets it on tape & we get the hell out of there after a few hours, nigel tags along to the international b&g & i step out side saying i'm going for smokes, walk a couple of blocks where the action still is & it's like i never left, hector standing in a doorway on e 13th drinking a bud pounder, you know, hector never holds, it's in his mailbox & then a few snorts on a quiet block off b & wings. i'm a lava lamp. i'm a microwave. i'm walking back to the international to hear the news choo-choo died that day. choo started the whole marijuana messenger service from the ashes of the church of realized fantasies years earlier. choo had heart & balls & was a great friend. the international was always our home base & some other people come in that were associated with the business. i am a lava lampshade with wings in some inner circle of gangsters. and then i'm not, i'm in hoboken the next morning singing a tribute song for choo in nigel's studio. nick wrote the words, came a long way through the pouring rain. i'm a lime green stratocaster that isn't mine. i'm a historian playing songs for the dead & then i'm on a train. i've always been on a train yelling my history at an engineer who has always been drunk. Don't smoke in bed nina simone paints my desk, my walls red blue deepblue johnny thunders nods in the corner he always dressed well like all the old jazz guys did patti smith is dancing barefoot she says warrior wins remember daddy i know she had 2 apartments on 5th ave right above washington sq that she tore out the walls and made them one while she danced with chinese rocks before fred, detroit i know my friend got stabbed in the back of the neck on calder st died there & when cleo said she didn't know how to help me anymore i told her that's all right Mike Boyle lives and works in Harrisburg, PA. There's been street life, bar life and factory life in several cities.There's been songs with several bands, poems, stories, home recordings as bohobait and several novel messes. His latest chapbook is Laundromat Suite (Rank Stranger Press) |
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