1354, This is a poem for people (like me) who hate their jobs Posted by thadonmama, Sat Dec-04-04 05:11 PM
for young buppies who wish they could (but know they’ll never) live their lives like jimi hendrix by Jarvis Q. DeBerry “’cause i got my own world to live through and i ain’t gonna copy you” -jimi hendrix, “if 6 was 9”
sometimes, jimi, we wish six was nine wish we could ditch our nine to fives starched white collars cuffed slacks and company parties (?) where don’t nobody be dancin’.
sometimes success seems stiflin’ uniformity becomes anonymity becomes we be indistinguishable cogs on corporate wheels spinnin’ around, going nowhere fast or even slow and we know that life is callin’ us to do something more, something uniquely us, something profoundly personal, something mystically musical, something wonderfully weird that will take the world a good two decades to catch on to.
but then the check comes and mama’s already told everybody she know that you got a good job and when you go home you get mobbed by folks telling you “i always knew you’d make it. you always was so smart.”
a good job. like the isley brothers and little richard gigs were good jobs, but you said i got sounds in my head and i can’t be playing ‘em wearing no mohair suits. can’t be 1-2-3-4ing no foreign dance steps. and if YOU think I’M being too outrageous then a wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-bop-bam my ass is outta here. gon’ take a spaceship to a musical planet that ain’t even been discovered yet.
and sometimes you gave us glimpses of what it was like there playing the star spangled banner in a manner more apocalyptic than patriotic, replacing rockets’ red glares with hiroshimaic melt-downs ungodly sounds that only you could reign in and make musical
o say can you see by the infernal light of the napalm burning villages in the night?
and though you eschewed copy cats we wish we was bold bad brazen crazily creative like you or at the very least we wish you would come back and teach us to un-care what others think how to un-need their approval how to un-cookie cut ourselves from the baking sheet of respectability before we are hardened into being just like the person one, two and three cubicles over.
but you have already gone high over yonder, leaving us here to hum along like well-oiled machines but with purple haze all in our brains.
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