Your Latest Local Music Darlings by Daniel W. Wright

Looking like second rate caricatures
in a fourth rate song
The band only wants
to keep the party going
Living stereotypes
long past their prime
Going through motions
like they go through women
who stay the same age
so they won't ever be smart enough
to see them as they are
because no woman their age
would deal with them.

They never tour
because they never want to sell out
and barely promote their shows
with promoters screaming at them
saying "Don't you know
Brian Epstein died for you!"
They'll always lose steam
after the first release
that first and only true burst
of creativity
Winning fixed polls
in whatever local music magazine
When you ask them their influences
they'll always say
Dylan or the Beatles
to show you
they mean business

Losing jobs and losing gigs
blaming everything on the scene
that already accepted them
Drink the money they made in a night
because it's never enough
though not their fault
Taking shit like sowing circle
about every other band
who they'll always support
and who they know
got their backs

Breaking up before breaking through
but just you wait,
the new projects of the main songwriters
THAT is gonna be the one
that'll make it big time.
Just you wait and see!

A poet of the no collar work force, Daniel W. Wright is a mid-western son who loves and loathes the red brick town that surrounds him. A longtime writer of wild nights and whiskey tributes, Wright speaks for the lover in every loner. He is currently the author of five chapbooks of poetry, the most recent being The Death of the Ladies Man with Bad Jacket Press. His work has appeared in the Gasconade Review as well as underground zines Bad Jacket and Crappy Hour