In Defense of Early 2000s Pop-punk Songs with Needlessly Long, Self indulgent Titles.

1.
There is a sound which when
fused to last night’s last light
will scrub the patina away leaving
a palimpsest for your auguries, a place
you will scribble your initials into.

There is a sound that overtakes
the buzzing of headphones. It is a violin
string leashed to the drill bit lodged in the throat. It is
ripped from the larynx, swaying— a pendulum—
an inverted metronome.

2.
They Say All Roads Lead to Rome, but I’ve Been Walking a While and the Roads Have Only Led Me to You
is the actual title of a song I wrote in high school.

3.
There is a sound that waits
in a guitar case
in a room a thousand miles away. This sound is
unburnished, unfinished, waiting for its number;
its number is the chorus. It goes like this:
the mirror that grew out of the mud
looked at the sky and asked “are you so blue
because it is my favorite color, or is it my favorite color
because you are so blue?”

4.
My grandma wears hearing aids and still hears music in everything. That’s why she calls my poems
songs. is a poem I will probably never finish because how could it ever be good enough?

5.
There is a sound which is a hollywood
promise in monochrome halted
on a film of silver dust.
The daguerreotype recalls
each eyelash, the quiver in the shoulder blade,
the contour of the hip
which is the mercurial vapor— which is the building
across from mine where the indigo weds
the sun-drenched gray panels and vaulted ceiling—
which is the burning iodide amber, a perfect asphalt etching.

6.
There’s a reason Chuck Taylors have been in style for over a century, and it isn’t baseball, basketball, or James Dean.
Is the actual title of a song I wrote in college.

7.
Cassettes rattle when the tape has to be reeled
back into place. The rattle is a sad
song that you’ve quilted to happy
memories. So the minor chords are
anchors, and the anchors are
floating up;

it is a bleak but urgent hope to feel what you’ve felt
before again;
it is a chase;
it is as close as you will ever get
again.

Gage Anderson (he/him) was born in Centennial, Colorado and garnered a love of storytelling from the age of ten. He graduated with a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington Seattle. His poems have appeared in Capillaries Journal, Bricolage, AU Speculative Fiction Journal, Twenty Bellows Online Journal and “We Are the West: A Colorado Anthology.” Gage believes that poetry is the closest he has ever come (or ever will come) to performing real magic; still, insists on calling himself a magician.

https://www.instagram.com/ganderson2275/