For The Record And Pete’s Sake:

Age slips a purgative into our reality …
The mindset manifests in spasms of release …
But we are never really free …
until our existentialism is resolved …
and then we are still left forced to deal with one another.

My sister bought the first Monkees album.
We listened to it repeatedly.
We seemed to know all the songs,
cause we had heard them all on the radio and the TV,
our mainlines to all things Pop.

We danced wildly to the “Last Train to Clarksville”,
and I stomped around the room crazily to “Sweet Young Thing”.
Our mother, however, was less impressed with this whole
“Hey, Hey, We’re the Monkees” theme.
She would holler, “Stop acting like a monkey!”.
“Monkee!”, I would retort.
And somewhere between Dixieland and Hooterville,
she would hurl scorn,
as she watched like a hawk over our younger toddler sibling thing,
she dubbed the miracle that had been born.

One day the Monkees record disappeared.
It was later found broken in half
with its album cover hidden behind the Hi-Fi
and its pieces beneath the old brown couch
our father would sleep on many nights.

My sister blamed me for the deed,
but I, of course, was innocent,
after all I was “Saturday’s Child” …
with no reason to be penitent.
“How could this be so?”,
I would plea, especially since
I could even recite the words to “I Wanna Be Free”!

Of course, I did not break it;
I loved that album, you see.
In fact, beyond a Beatle,
it was a Monkee I had dreamed to be,
… as seen on TV.

Meanwhile, our mother looked on with a laugh-augh;
she could once again play her own music on her phonograph.
And, as my sister and I were busy fighting each other with aggression,
we could not endanger her little mama’s boy,
born to satisfy her own need for attention.

Sometime later, I asked my father, if he would please
buy me a different LP … and, yes, he agreed …
especially since I had spotted it
in a bargain bin at Zayre, you see?

“Headquarters” was the title it bore,
and it was produced by the Monkees,
not prefabricated for them as before.
I listened to it again and again,
in the process wearing out two needles,
one turntable …
and my mother’s patience thin.

It held a slightly different vibe,
but “For Pete’s Sake” and
that “Alternate Title” (aka “Randy Scouse Git”)
I got it …
and so did “Mr. Webster”, it seems.
Even “Zilch” an odd ditty oddity wont to digress,
but to me, as I would later understand,
it was something seminally dada-eque!

One day, alas, this record, too, disappeared.
When eventually found, it was cracked,
as I had feared.
But most of all, I was in deep shock and distress,
since I had discovered it stashed away …
under my sister’s mattress!
How did I know to look there …
where she sometimes stashed her diary, indeed?
Oh, I gave that one away;
by then I had learned to read.

My sister, of course, denied breaking my long playing disc.
“The Monkees are so over”, she would say, anyway,
with her voice surreptitiously sounding like Gidget.
So we fought for years about who was to blame,
and with age … sarcastic accusatory laughter
would grow to replace the pain.

In truth, however, history alone bears witness over time.
One easily feigns denial …
while another establishes a cover-up to blind.
To divide and conquer was one motive,
while the other was simply primitive.
Yes … the miracle toddler in diapers did it!
But … the mother was guilty of her own crime.
It wasn’t enough to simply throw away the evidence.
No! It was to pit the older siblings against each other
in order to mainly protect that with which …
or … ok, with whom …
her affections were aligned.

All in the dysfunctional family, some say,
but the more things change,
the more they stay the same.
And still, I suppose it could have been much worse.
And some are quick to judge, “of course, of course”.
And yet I wonder if love is love or only “Shades of Gray”,
as we trip through ages,
dreaming day by day … and still dismayed.
My, how cycles repeat, like reruns,
for lack of intervention and discourse.
And so says I for the record and for Pete’s sake, with no remorse:
A horse is a horse, of course, of course.

#Love is understanding
#We gotta be free.

Please note: the above was inspired by the recent passing of Peter Tork, musician of The Monkees fame. Moreover, the above work is one, for the most part, of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. (Yeah right, and Monkees might fly out of my butt.)