Instrument of Choice by Robert Phillips

I’ve got the flu and the blues. Which is why getting out of bed to go to school is a bitch, as it always is. Slightly off-center (again), I’m spending my days wallowing in the drain – watching Amelie and listening to Comtine D’un Autre Eté over and over like a wretched lover, reading Murakami and Kundera in excerpts, searching for Django Reinhardt in YouTube and devouring his guitar-playing, talking to random strangers in my head, sleeping at 4am, waking up and feeling nothing.

I wish for sex and cigarettes, but I’m just plain vegetable right now.

And the things I discover: reading last night’s poem made me look for similar themes, and here, a gem –

Instrument of Choice
Robert Phillips

She was a girl
no one ever chose
for teams or clubs,
dances or dates,

so she chose the instrument
no one else wanted:
the tuba. Big as herself,
heavy as her heart,

its golden tubes
and coils encircled her
like a lover’s embrace.
Its body pressed on hers.

Into its mouthpiece she blew
life, its deep-throated
oompahs, oompahs sounding,
almost, like mating cries.

Oh, the painful things that tug at your heart.