.poetry "the fun i have at parties"

I've had too many cigarettes tonight;
the smoke needles my throat with every bitter inhalation.
But I'll take any excuse
to get away from that damned music at this point,
so I sit by the rusted K-Mart patio set
on the back porch of the low-rent apartment,
away from the miasma of student-poor alcohol
and clothes-designer perfumes,
to have another smoke.

I don't know who was singing that last
miscarriage of a song;
does it matter?
Do any of those newer new kids on the block
actually account for anything in life
other than record sales?
If it weren't for their asinine tattoos, that
pseudo-tribal bullshit designed by lonely marketers,
I'd swear all those acts were the same six caustic crooners
(five if one's stuck in rehab)
just moonlighting under different names.

Oh, but don't worry,
if you like your music a little harder
there's white boy rappers
with their white bedsheet-wearing lyrics,
hundreds of performers who manage to suck
at hard rock and rap at the same time,
a plethora of neo-grunge acts suffering
from delusions of adequacy,
just a roiling sonic soup of
talentless, mindless, useless, hopeless dreck.

And then there is the sisterhood of singing silicone,
peach-pale skin looking like overpolished furniture,
bodies maintained by a diet of
just enough water to swallow the pills.
You can't get no satisfaction?
Well sweetie, neither can the rest of us,
because it's illegal to kill you
even though you pissed in the prizest vintage of songs
you fucking hack.

There's a reason I don't host parties.
Granted, no one can get drunk enough
to make Tori Amos music danceable,
but my ecletic collection of compact discs
repulses my generational gentry
even more than exam week.

"Bij, buj, beej ... bee-york?
Oh, that chick in the swan dress?
Man, she doesn't sing, she yodels
like a cat in heat with its tail stuck
in a meat grinder, she sucks."
"Sarah McLachlan? She's sooooooo three years ago,
wake up to 2002 and quit being so sensitive,
that's not what's cool anymore."

Musicians with actual musical talent "suck"?
Being sensitive isn't "cool anymore"?
Fuck you
and those campy, camera-clamoring, cacophonous
wastes of radio airwaves so audaciously announced
as musicians of my generation.

Do these people actually listen to my music?
Do they know anything about the singers I like?
No, their words painfully echo in my head
without me even having to hear them spoken once:
"If so-and-so is so good then
why isn't she on MTV?"
How ironic to so ardently rebel
against whatever isn't shoved down your throat
by the media-ignominy complex.

I flick the spent butt away in disgust
and brace for the next heaving horror of hits
charting straight to the top, just like pond scum,
only without pond scum's aesthetic qualities.
I flock to the fringe of the giant freak being gotten on
and feign tolerance of what passes as music to these people.
Hey, I'm just trying to fit in.