The sky is platinum blonde,
so bright I avert my eyes.
Everything is a staple, a fret, an acre of salt, some twine
laid flat on sand with nothing caught inside.
One part of bad news,
psychological researchers say, cancels five parts of good;
one line of will and must, of take what you get,
can cancel out a line of wish or would.
Please, everybody alive,
do your best to stay that way.
It’s hard enough to grieve for talented strangers,
albeit they did not seem so. There will be no more songs
brought down to this Earth by Scott Miller of Sacramento
and Davis, CA: the author, while there,
of “Bad Year at UCLA,”
and later of “Don’t Bother Me While I’m Living Forever,”
of “Song About ‘Rocks Off”’—but not, of course, of “Rocks Off”—
of “I’ve Tried Subtlety,” the least subtle
among his disgruntled effects, and of “Aerodeliria,”
which begins Aerodeliria jet ride, it don’t affect me now
and whose chorus concludes I don’t think we’ll ever lose—no more misdirections,
intuitive puns or unfolded misconceptions,
no more mathematical games
or matrices made up of names,
nothing to graph or get lost in,
nothing else for needy, supposedly
gifted children to put that level of trust in
as of today
(and the blocky clouds fold up
as if hiding behind themselves in a rolling moiré)
who left us not so much,
or rather not only, with so many finished songs
as with the sense that he had more to say.