Player
Posted by Justin Ching | Filed under Poetry, Print
Summer breeze fills the room like August at the Hollywood Bowl
The air mingles with clouds of cheap cologne
Raining down upon a young man below, suited in an Abercrombie polo, and acid wash jeans.
He is ready for his performance
A hush whistles across the room as it collectively inhales,
And his ringtone crescendos through his pregame sound track,
He checks his inbox,
To find he’s already being holla’d at by a girl
And as he reads her text messages aloud,
He reads them like lead sheets ready to conduct a private symphony in his honor
You see,
He always thought the sound his voice was music to his ears,
And as he dims the lights to his private concert hall,
And exits his room,
He places a condom in his back pocket
Like the dropping of a baton
And the first movement begins with the words, “I’m getting some tonight”
He liked to keep track of girls
Track them into songs,
So that he trace their curves like amplitudes of sound waves into coke bottle figures,
Track them and arrange their names into playlists,
Like the contact lists of his cellphone,
So whenever he got a song stuck in his “little” head
He knew where to go to play his booty calls,
He kept track of girls,
Put them on shuffle like the greek letters that scaled the walls of the frats he cruised to pick up on girls.
And, with cheap liquor as his instrumental,
He laced his tracks with beats he produced on the sound board of his mattress in a private studio beneath his sheets.
He kept track of girls,
Never owned a complete album in his life because he was only interested in singles
he could turn into one hit wonders,
And, even though there may have been a time when he dug oldschool,
He shunned a relationship with vinyl,
Because he didn’t wanna commit to a girl from start to finish once he laid his needle to Her skin.
In fact,
He’d rather go out and buy his songs on the corner.
So he kept track of girls,
Wasn’t even afraid to pimp smack a girl,
Didn’t trip if he left scars and bruises upon her body
Cause scratches upon his mix CD’s only meant it was time for him to skip to the next track.
He kept track of girls,
He said “I love you’s” like curse words on the hottest rap singles,
Uncensored audio accents spoken into her ears in the privacy of stereo headphones
But blipped and blanked out in the public sound waves of broadcast radio,
yet, how could he possibly love some one else when he didn’t even love himself,
So kept track of girls
sometimes just to listen to their bodies breathe by his side while he slept,
Like a subliminal self-help tape that gave him the confidence to say he was “the man”
He kept track
So that someone would listen to the soundtrack for life.
Well, if music be the food of love,
Play on.
