Watching YouTube in East Preston, March 2014
Ode to Bruce and Tom
There’s a darkness on the edge of town
and the ghost of Tom Joad feels trapped.
He is but a spirit in the night,
remembering the love of a Jersey girl.
A reason to believe takes him through
the tunnel of love and beyond the badlands.
He looks inside Candy’s room, but she’s
with Johnny 99 down on Thunder Road.
57 channels of consciousness and nothing on
but a glimpse of the river in Nebraska.
Tom’s spirit is dancing in the dark, wishing
it was blinded by the light of his glory days.
He yearns for the human touch that
the grapes of wrath of this hard land denied him.
Better days in a lucky town with Mary
in a secret garden will erase his great depression.
He floats along the streets of Philadelphia and
flashes his way through Atlantic City.
Tom no longer has a hungry heart and
he doesn’t feel like he was born to run
because he was born in the USA.
Life, he realises, is but a brilliant disguise.