Listen to Me (for Jimi)
Just here in this ear,
I can hear the serene sound of a
plucked and hammered dulcimer,
while over there…
the other guy… the other ear…
He in the other gets
a hardwired Fender Stratocaster.
He gets Humbucker Pickups
and massive Marshall Amps.
Whammy bar wha-wha
and Hendrixian feedback.

A super-sonic spiral of distortion chicanes
down my aural canal
and there arrives at abrupt end
with a roto-rooter ear-drum-roll of dice.
It do rattle them scat sung skeletals,
and lo but resident bone dancers,
Brothers Stapes, Incus and Maleus,
gyrate in compound fractured syncopation
to the pulse of 100 watt stacked
tremelopinion.

But beyond the gray matter side
of my pink inner ear,
no favorable acoustic environment
will ever exist for the dulcimer musings
of a soft melodic mind.
You out on the far side of this
conga concussed cranium experience
none of this.
In here,
hammers continue to fall yet
nothing is ever damaged;
nothing is ever smashed,
and no, nothing ever relents.


How can I possibly have you hear
my song of self, when
the inside of this mind is a
heavy padded room?
How can I hope to hold sway
when there, in your brain,
two mighty speakers hang
from pre frontal lobes?
How can I and my dulcimer compete
when your mental synapses are grafted
to a left-hand strung Stratocaster?
Fused to Jimi and
‘Hey Joe’.
To Jimi and
‘Purple Haze’.
To Jimi and…
‘Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)’.

Why, you’d have to be insane to prefer
that noise over the dulcet
dulcimer tones of
my voice.
I said…
I said, “You’d have to be insane
to prefer that to me.”
Me.
This voice.
Listen.

Listen to me.

It’s me in your head,
and not him.
Me in your head;
not him.

LISTEN TO ME.
Listen to me.
listen…

©06 Jack Hubbell