I learned this from an emo girl
I was fourteen and she sixteen
she was roaring out ‘Lilac Bough’ all off-key and mega sexy
and she said those words
don’t mean a thing
and that only yelling
only yelling’s got a point
FRA-GRANT-LY
she dragged as deep on her cigarette
as a loud emo girl could in 2012
at the playground in the park outside the plaza
and it wasn’t ‘the trees’ or ‘the breeze’
or ‘the wind in the branches’ or the ‘rustling’
she was battling with but my world-suffering
rising up inside her she wanted it to stop
and everything to be good
MO-THER-OF-MINE
and ever since then that song’s got
a special secret meaning
it’s about selena about the girl
who was really the spit of selena gomez
just she’d fallen hard for the punk boys
and knew that everything you didn’t
keep to yourself could be sold off
the tune comes down
from a major pentatonic
into a minor
it might not be true but
years later someone said that’s what
makes this song so rare and sweet
they wanted to impress me
and did impress me
I gave them a bit of it
but like every rarity
it has no value in itself
when you reject the point of a song
you can’t take it away
only stick a new cover over it
new burdens on the drunken yells
because love is nothing
compared to the world’s sufferings
and it’s only by chance
that these days I think a lot about
the emo girl who’s since grown up
and who once that time outside the plaza
was so very right.