Hello, Fellow Awkward Ducks!
Here are some ducks and an imagined awkward encounter! Instead of an essay today you get the regular haiku comic and what I think is the longest poem I’ve ever posted here. Don’t worry, it’s still a short read or listen.
crisp wind ensemble, fall colors dance on water ducks glide across pond
If I Ever Meet Billy Corgan It Will Be In A Bookshop
If I ever meet Billy Corgan, it will be in a bookshop. Not a bookstore filled with calendars, shiny hardbacks, and overpriced coffee, but a proper bookshop that peddles some new, but mostly used books and is more mold and musk then bright and welcoming. It will be on my first trip to New York City. I will spy the shop with a clever name, something like Tome Raider or The Dog Ear, while walking down some street and enter. It will be the kind of shop where the owner’s nephew mans the till on weekends when he’s home from Columbia, where he's studying economics, because his mom makes him, and so his visage drips with disdain and he makes passive aggressive comments about each customer purchase because he thinks he’s clever but he’s just an asshole. I’ll spy Billy bent over to grab something from below the shelf that’s bowing under the weight of obscure Russian literature titles in a narrow aisle while on my way to a collection of hipster Beat-revival chapbooks. Billy will stand up and we will meet eye-to-eye, bald head to bald head. He’ll politely nod and I will say: Thank you for your music. I want you to know that my freshman year in college, my best friend and roommate C would get back from classes about the same time as me each day. C would enter the apartment we shared with four other dudes without saying a word and head straight for our shared bedroom and pull out my copy of Siamese Dream, and blast Today. C would close his eyes, sigh a Sisyphean sigh, and then smile. Before the song ended he would say, “It’s lunch time.” Billy will smile and make to leave the conversation and my life while saying something like, “I’m glad my music meant something to you.” But before he escapes the aisle, I’ll add: My first book of poetry comics is called Quantum Joy Infinite Melancholy after your 1995 double album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. I still have trouble spelling melancholy right because of that album. Your music gave me so much—well—a lot of—not something as fragile and fleeting as joy. Your music gave me a lot of understanding, and I just wanted to say thank you. Billy’s body language will show his discomfort and I will understand that I have overstayed my welcome in the aisle and in his life. Thanks, I will mutter before turning around and walking out of the store at a brisk New York pace, never getting to look at the hipster Beat-revival chapbooks. Later, when I tell people about meeting Billy Corgan, I’ll never be able to remember the name of the bookshop, and I’l never find that shop again no matter how many times I go down that street where it once was and has always been. I’ll half-believe the whole thing was a Manhattan fae food-fueled fever dream. But, then I will remember the smell of the Russian literature section and the look of condescension on the nephew’s face behind the register and the look of panic and pain in Billy Corgan’s eyes. Then I will listen to Bullet with Butterfly Wings and understand myself a little better.
Be the poetry you want to see in the world!
Cheers,
Jason
The BEST kind of bookshop!
This is the type of poetry that makes you think and feel. That’s what poetry is for... I have yet to put any of my own writing on my stack. I’m afraid of rejection but I’m also not scared about dying but maybe afraid of living... that’s a good start for a song ohhh yeah that’s the beginning of the Sam Cooke song “A Change is Going to Come “... and now I remember that song is the best form of poetry or is it just that songs are poetry set to music?