Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)
Right after the album came out
Jimi Hendrix learned the song and played
it as if it were his own. There are
enough witnesses to know that’s fact.
Myth: at a show he released two parakeets
that flew the venue and now their descendents
overwhelm the square. Every bird of that ilk
in London came like magic from his sleeve,
his puffy hippie shirt sleeve.
Wouldn’t
it be nice if those stories were true,
if there were green and silver flashese of Jimi
in the Soho sky, not just a photograph,
fisheyed of two white Brits and one black
American in Kew on a rock, not just
vinyl, CDs, and whatever streaming services
save sound on, but heart-beating, song-singing,
peach and happy-love parakeets fluttering wings
above the city’s Spring. Those first two birds’ DNA
still spiraling in thermal updrafts or Hendrix
with this song, not even his. Imagine the
sharp bite of a bent guitar string in
his calloused fingertip—a thing
he couldn’t feel. Imagine hearing that song
that night live, a note curves into air, carves
cuts, its steel blade pressed on our childish,
virgin, yielding skin.
Gary Leising is the author of the book, The Alp at the End of My Street, from Brick Road Poetry Press (2014). He has also published three poetry chapbooks: The Girl with the JAKE Tattoo (Two of Cups Press, 2015), Temple of Bones (Finishing Line Press, 2013), and Fastened to a Dying Animal (Pudding House, 2010). He lives in Clinton, New York, with his wife and two sons, where he teaches creative writing and poetry as a professor of English.