Oh Joey I’m Not Angry Any More
by Christian Barter
Oh Joey I’m Not Angry Any More
— Concrete Blonde, 1990
1
Joey, I can hardly remember now
the Portland I found at twenty like a continent
inhabited by cars and Concrete Blonde.
It takes so long to change but then you’ve changed.
Changed beyond what you knew was there to sail to.
Changed beyond even memory’s mothering hands —
memory, which for so long had convinced me
that through that god no part of me ever faded.
You cannot go back. I’ve been saying so
like prayer, facing east, since I was young,
though always hunting with my hands for the loophole,
the flaw in death that would let the light through.
But the young man’s only young for what’s inside him:
he is pregnant, with the future, and high on its hormones.
2
I’m writing this well before the dawn,
and I have work to do later, a long day of it —
hauling things up and down, smoothing processes —
and it is likely that I will be tired at some point,
some tool I need will be broken, I’ll be aware
of the passing year, the dates, the tasks for those —
but it doesn’t seem to matter any more,
this young fatigue now gaining girth in me.
It isn’t because I’m aware of the bigger picture
than when I caught the first trance of that chorus,
and it isn’t because I have stopped caring — I still
check every stone to see that it fits tightly —
or simply because I am less afraid, although
I am less afraid, less afraid of not being angry,
3
though mostly I’m less angry at being afraid.
In the song to you when Concrete Blonde says,
All is forgiven — listen, listen —
there’s a sense that love has won out over pettiness
and yes, a fearlessness in that shouting serenade,
the way the best emotions, the truest emotions
always manifest, however else, as courage . . .
which is why it is lack of emotion that has led
to the War on Terror, the shackling of asylum seekers,
and the hands-frozen-on-steering-wheel unwillingness
to change our so-called course, to cool our coal stacks
even for a day. We are afraid
because we don’t know how to love, Joey —
And though I used to wonder why,
4
my best buds shouting back at me in tune —
why we get old and lose that other world,
why love shivs you right after showing you God —
pounding the fist of that G chord in the hall
of 1990, that now-empty room
in that town that only comes back when it wants to —
why doesn’t seem to matter any more,
why seems as wrong as looking for WMD’s
or searching up under the dress of every stranger;
that particular kind of greed has left me,
that prisoner’s belief in the one key,
that lust for that still-unmapped continent —
that hormone, that trigger, that alcoholic thirst —
that deep, abiding faith, that anger.