Woo Woo by Joe Coccaro

Author:Joe Coccaro
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633935549
Publisher: Koehler Books
Published: 2015-01-16T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

CARTER ARRIVED HOME worried about the poetry thing. Hattie had made it sound important to impress Jessep with sherry and poetry. Why poetry? He wasn’t sure. Seemed odd, but so many things around Cape Charles seemed about twenty degrees off-center. Malcolm would cover the sherry, but even that high-minded Scot likely didn’t have Keats or Byron by his bedside.

Carter booted up his PC and opened a file he called “Musings.” It was mostly a list of rhymes and limericks he had jotted over the years when bored at work or when sick of watching TV at home. He wasn’t a poet, not even close, but he deeply admired the poetry of American author Jim Harrison and always loved song lyrics. None were better than Bob Dylan’s, Joni Mitchell’s, and Notorious B.I.G’s.

As a teen, he read lyrics on album covers or song sheets as he listened repeatedly. Ultimately, Carter concluded that he had neither the courage nor imaginative dexterity to write music for public consumption. He remained artistically closeted out of practicality. Writing newspaper articles, he’d found, was a vulgar substitute for real creativity—lifeless, stagnant, and pedantic. But chasing and typing facts and arranging them in a reverse pyramid of importance was steady work that had paid the rent. At least he could call himself a writer.

“Newspaper work is cleaner than the Ford plant and pays more than Walmart,” he’d joke.

Carter scrolled through his list of musings, wincing at the idiocy of some. But there was one that seemed to fit his quest with Rose, an aborted effort inspired by a Dylan song and penned by Carter after his session back in late spring with Kate Lee-Capps, the psychologist. Carter had thought about sending the rhyme to Kate as a cathartic admission that he was moving on with life. But Carter being Carter, he’d chickened out. He had dwelled on Kate a lot and feared she would think the poem clumsy or juvenile and dismiss him as morose. Carter had felt like a hormonal eighth grader with a hard-on for his just-out-of-college sexy English teacher. Acting on such impulse would leave a wake of foreboding, he’d reasoned, and shatter the sexual fantasy of Kate visiting him at night.

The poem, Carter had decided, would remain his undisclosed tribute to Dylan. He always considered Dylan America’s greatest poet, not a mere folk singer. He would celebrate mightily when the aged rocker received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Stockholm would provide Carter and the world with a moment of sanity by celebrating Dylan, a peacemonger, and by so doing snub headlining hatemongers like Putin, Netanyahu, Trump, and Kim Jong-un.

Carter pulled up the rhyme and printed out a copy:

Trust What You See

Streets fill with water, the beach with blowing sand

Here comes the wind, I’m taking a stand

The howls and hollers, the screams don’t scare me

Legs stuck in the mud, please leave me be

Look to the right, then look to the left

I’m crossing to the other side, with some distress

I worry that something big will

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