Firework

April 4, 1981

I used to watch the fireworks outside Clifton Stadium.

My mother used to drag me there and we would sit on the lawn by a large grassy knoll with an oak tree at its peak.

The fire works shot up out of the stadium like magic, bursting high in the sky with showers of color.

For some reason, it took me years to realize these bursts came with explosions, and then after a few years of going, I got scared, hands over my ears against the sound – each boom seeming to explode inside of me as well as out.

Still later, the noise didn’t bother me at all. In fact, when I went there as a teen, it was for the booms and not the bursts of color.

I could not get enough of the loudness, and I could not duplicate it, no matter how high I turned up the radio volume when I got home.

Sometimes, I just went out into the back yard and yelled as loud as I could, drawing the wrath of my uncles who hurried from every part of the house to find out what was wrong and grew enraged when I could not tell them.

I simply loved sound, the louder the better, and music like the Beatles and the Stones only scratched the surface of the itch I felt, fireworks of a sort that went off inside my head each time I dropped the needle onto the surface of the record.

I still don’t know what I expected, perhaps looking for a niche in this ever shrinking world where I needed to find voice I could not find any place else.

Or maybe something real, a bit of beauty that has to come with an explosion inside and out, a sense of pain and pleasure mingling.

I live in the very real world of Passaic, and pass all sorts of good and bad people in my walk down the block, hardly shocked, or even judgmental, always waiting for some light show and explosions to mark this life, illuminated.

Maybe I am the firework, waiting for someone to light my fuse.

I think that there’s a word for me

A gross thing in my mouth

I think that is it killing me

To ever let it out.