for young buppies who wish they could (but know they’ll never) live their lives like jimi hendrix
by Jarvis Q. DeBerry (‘00,‘02)
“’cause i got my own world to live through and i ain’t gonna copy you” -jimi hendrix, “if 6 was 9”

sometimes, jimi,
we wish six was nine
wish we could ditch our nine to fives
starched white collars
cuffed slacks and
company parties (?)
where don’t nobody be dancin’.

sometimes success seems stiflin’
uniformity becomes anonymity
becomes we be
indistinguishable cogs on corporate wheels
spinnin’ around, going nowhere fast
or even slow
and we know that life is callin’
us to do something more,
something uniquely us,
something profoundly personal,
something mystically musical,
something wonderfully weird
that will take the world a good two decades
to catch on to.

but then the check comes
and mama’s already told everybody she know
that you got a good job
and when you go home you get mobbed
by folks telling you
“i always knew you’d make it.
you always was so smart.”

a good job.
like the isley brothers and little richard gigs
were good jobs,
but you said
i got sounds in my head
and i can’t be playing ‘em
wearing no mohair suits.
can’t be 1-2-3-4ing
no foreign dance steps.
and if YOU think I’M being too outrageous
then a wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-bop-bam my ass
is outta here.
gon’ take a spaceship to a musical planet
that ain’t even been discovered yet.

and sometimes you gave us glimpses
of what it was like there
playing the star spangled banner
in a manner more apocalyptic
than patriotic,
replacing rockets’ red glares
with hiroshimaic melt-downs
ungodly sounds that only you
could reign in
and make musical

o say can you see
by the infernal light
of the napalm burning
villages in the night?

and though you eschewed copy cats
we wish we was
bold bad brazen
crazily creative
like you
or at the very least
we wish you would come back
and teach us to un-care
what others think
how to un-need
their approval
how to un-cookie cut ourselves
from the baking sheet of respectability
before we are hardened
into being just like the person
one, two and three cubicles over.

but you have already gone
high over yonder,
leaving us here
to hum along like well-oiled machines
but with purple haze
all in our brains.

Copyright © Jarvis Q. DeBerry. All right reserved. Used by permission of the author

Born in September 1975, Jarvis Q. DeBerry grew up in Holly Springs, Mississippi, where he read lots of books, played kickball with his 30 cousins and listened to his family tell funny stories at high volumes. He studied engineering at Washington University in St. Louis before studying English. An editorial writer at the New Orleans Times-Picayune, DeBerry’s work has appeared in the anthologies Step Into a World, These Hands I Know, and Speak the Truth to the People, an anthology of the NOMMO Literary Society, a New Orleans-based creative writing workshop. DeBerry writes because, “If I didn’t, I’d be even more verbose, which would chase all my friends away.”

Copyright © 1997-2001 by Cave Canem Foundation, Inc.

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