All I can seem to hear tonight
Are Dylan’s fingers squeaking on the strings,
The quartet’s grunts and sniffs
As they wrestle with Beethoven,
Alfred Brendel humming along
With a Schubert sonata,

And all I can seem to hear tonight
Is the train rumble under the cellist’s feet,
Pigeons making noisy love in the rafters
While the sopranos launch below,
Miles Davis telling Teo to play that back, Teo,
Teo, play that back,

And Teo plays it back,
The fumbled chords,
The false starts,
The traffic noises,
And a laughing Robert Plant tells Jimmy Page no
Leave it, yeah and they left it and
I’m hearing it all tonight,
It’s all I can seem to hear.

(First published in slightly different form in Alternate Route #10, Summer 2023. Thanks to editor Michael Starr.)