PROSE | TANKA | EKPHRASTIC

I Wish You Were Here

Poetry inspired by Pink Floyd

Creating the Wish You Were Here album cover. IMAGE: Quique, CCBY 2.0 Wikimedia Commons

I Wish You Were Here holding out a handshake of hardwired hypocrisy, hellbent on hanging your halo helter-skelter, scratching sticks for smoke signals, siphoning sin from singles for the sadists and skeptics, holding hot stones on the collarbones of corrupt heretics.

Go on and grandstand with gallons of gas, so I can simultaneously stare down your sunken stardom, and smile as your swagger smolders, facing the feckless flames of failed fame, a flash in the pan face-plant, spinning salty sabotage with shrapnel scorching shortcomings, a scratch of the needle neglected and neurotic.

Have a Cigar, suit-slinging superstar, a makeshift martyr missing the match of panache, bringing in billions off Billboard backs. Inhale some integrity, and melt the mockery of the music industry, extinguishing echoes encroaching on the distinguished. Suck on the ash of apathy, while I douse in the diesel of your delirious catastrophe, a one-hit wonder’s combustion.

Welcome to the Machine of make believe, burned by bureaucracy’s inner sleeve, a 33’s vinyl dreams, exposing the smoke screen with kerosene, breathing the disease down deserted streets.