musical insanity

the notes sometimes flow in and out of my head like a
bad radio cliche stuck in your memory on a loop
where you can only sing one line of the song because
maybe that's the only good line of the song
as if someone came up with one good line
and then decided that those eight words needed
three verses and several sets of chorus repetition built
around it and you don't bother looking up the actual lyrics
online or anything because you know that the eight words
you know are the only eight words that anyone knows and
beyond that, the additional words are really really horrible
like some stream of consciousness poem but just emphasizing
sex and rock and how awesome the band or the singer is and
really it is just some sort of self-masturbation for a lyricist whose
sole accomplishment was the creation of an eight word phrase.
Only this time the notes are mine, they are some song that is
most likely theft of another great tune but for the immediate
future I pretend that it is a great melody rivaling Mozart
that I have devised in some grand scheme to wrap my own set
of eight words around it and I obsess, but of course I am on the
street in downtown Dallas
and there are no musicians around or even a recorder so I can
hum the tune
and so my one true moment of musical genius, however catchy it is
for the next five minutes as it bounces back and forth in my skull
is destined to be lost forever once I reach my destination and I fool
myself into thinking that if it were really greatness then it would be
a melody I remember because some musician without any money told me that one time -
only in this clarity do I realize why that musician had no money -
and despite my vow to spend eight hours with a guitar in the studio I know, already,
that all of this effort is in vain, vain struggle for a moment of purity, clarity, tonality
where I can find that lost melody again but it has vanished into the place
where all of the great tunes go when they have left
your head for good and are no longer on continuous playback.