Clean: An Anthology

The Singer

the singer would never forget her
he would never forget how she stood on her tiptoes,
wearing sharpie-drawn converse and a hot topic tank.
how she seemed so light, yet so heavy with the weight
of all of her issues, her diagnoses, her dreams astray.

excitedly, she told the singer that she was seventeen.
she had hyacinth eyes and cornsilk hair,
and she was as thin as the rail his microphone sat on.
and although the girl claimed that she had been saved,
he could have sworn he saw pale rose slashes
beneath her the collection of silicone wristbands
adorning, wrapping around, covering her arms.

she leaned in, whispered about all of the things
that he had, unwillingly and unwittingly, done for her.
he had kept the girl alive all these tortured years
with his voice and lyrics alone giving her gasoline.
but was it really my songs, he wondered
or was it her work, a product of strength she denied?

a stern, bored mother in charcoal-rimmed glasses
beckoned the young blonde back over to her side.
but as the singer watched her glance back at him,
he felt a pang of recognition for the boy he used to be.
but as he went back to his nirvana soundtracked youth,
he realized that he had saved himself, put his energy
into well-worn notebooks and tape recorders
and somehow pulled through every single day.

suddenly, the singer realized that he was no savior.
that maybe the screaming crowds were stronger
than they ever thought they could be.
that maybe the girls and the boys in the merch
with blacked up eyes and dreams of being swept away
were only pushing the work of their own salvation
onto a man with a microphone and a louder voice.

but as he went to sleep that night, tour bus
ricketing on the roads as he traveled on his route
he pulled out his old red, sharpie-drawn notebook
and wrote a song about the dreamers, the waiters,
the high school gothics that he could not save.