22 and mourning Prince (and David Bowie)

This is a bad year for losing significant musical influences and comforts. I loved Prince from the moment I saw him strutting around a stage in a little cave man costume singing "I Wanna Be Your Lover" and David Bowie was always inspirational.  Both of these musicians were instrumental (see what I did there?) to me in college, when I really "came into my own" (what the hell does that really mean), found myself, started writing the real writing, etcetera. When I ended up teaching aerobics (yes, that really happened), I used Prince's DMSR as my anthem. I can remember coming home and putting that album on my stereo, turning it up, and jumping up and down in my bedroom. It was a way to purge myself of some of the anxiety that seemed to teem in my blood.

So today I'm going to again assign myself a poem prompt: write something about the musicians who saved me from myself.

*

Soundtrack

Those were tumultuous times.
In every college classroom, I wondered
who I would become
on the other side,
what might happen in 1987, when I'd be
set loose upon the world and expected
to survive.
How would I support myself? How would I
be able to stand it,
alone with myself in a world that seemed indifferent
to my inchoate desires, to my
small voice and smaller
furies and frustrations, joys and sorrows.
And who would love me
if I couldn't even
love myself?

Thank god, then, for David Bowie and Prince,
for The Clash and Elvis Costello,
Tom Petty, Neal Young, Randy Newman,
Lou Reed and the Talking Heads.
Praise Jesus for Janis Ian, Crosby, Stills and Nash,
Van Morrison, Steve Winwood and Madonna,
for Paul Simon, Chopin, Haydn, and the Violent Femmes,
for Steely Dan and Jonathan Edwards.

They told me to put on my red shoes and dance the blues,
offered to be my lover (the only one to make me come --
running) and told me my aim was true when I
burned down the houses that raised me.
They told me to teach the children I thought
I'd never have with the sound of silence,
even though I was helpless,
and reminded me that rednecks didn't know their ass
from a hole in the ground.
They stoned me to my soul, touched me
like a virgin, said I didn't have to live like a refugee,
(though I still felt like one),
told the sunshine to go away, thrilled me
with  liquid, golden sadness, melancholy blood
that shot through my veins, that
lifted and soothed me, held me fast
in a dark ocean of sound and sense,
or pumped me from place to place,
or settled me into dreams at last then
helped me to claw my way back up
again.

Their voices, eternal, echo now,
decades later,
as the soundtrack to my beginning,
the start of my journey,
evoking the moments (vivid because of them)
that formed me into poetry and story,
into love and teaching and talking and writing,
and that always brought me back
into this flawed and beautiful body
aware of the pulsing breathing world all around it,
as it pressed like light and air against its
wonderful skin.