Starship Tahiti: Poems

Metallica Burns on the Altar of the Viking Rockstar

58 Metallica Burns on the Altar of the Viking Rockstar It was thrash in a steel town. Day jobs as night managers tending an oracle of gasoline fires and industrial accidents. Flaming suddenly into verse and chorus they wanted to be poured into glass bottles and hurled. This was their first album. Before detox. Before therapy, forced to cut their hair and reflect. The awkward postures of youth resemble something molting, ripping through a hairy pod and spitting goo from its mandibles, waving its praying mantis limbs in a strobe lit cloud of pheromones. The first recording I ever made was in the basement of my grandmother’s house – my friend Charlie and I told stories into a tape player describing the exploits of Vikings who pillaged and fucked their way through southern Maryland. I’d read many fantasy novels, but I liked the cover illustrations best, paintings of muscled heroes armed 59 with swords and women clothed in animal skins kneeling or chained or thrown over the hero’s shoulder. My friend, a foster kid, showed me the scars on his stomach and legs from numerous skin grafts. When he was an infant his mother dropped him in boiling water or spilled it on him, accidentally or not and he was taken from her and raised by our neighbor, a drunken army lieutenant. I imagine him compelled to speak by an indescribable pain inflicted on him before he knew words. Our stories overlapped and entangled as we recorded them, stopped and replayed the tape to hear our voices. Thrill of an exotic beast captured, prowling the yard, the pattern of its striped coat shifting as its muscles lengthened. 60 Once the tape was found my punishment was to listen while my parents and grandparents blasted it at the dining room table. Dear elders, I’m still shaming you, writing it down now so you can’t erase the pulverizing drum. Go ahead, you can taste this paper lubricated with semen and bourbon; it’s flammable, and your names may be written there, leaves destined for a manual on how to become a Viking Rockstar. ...