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There was a time when I was angry.
At what, I could never quite say.
Only that walking on and on along the rails laid out for me felt, no matter what, like “not me.”
Punk rock was the music that gave that outline a name.
The target of defiance changes
After the Sex Pistols ended, John Lydon moved on to the next music.
He set out to break the very “form” of punk itself.
As the years pile up, the place your anger points to changes.
Not society, not someone — but inertia, the self that is the same as yesterday, your own limits.
Far harder than defying something forever is going on being who you are.
The things I could not understand when I was young grow in number with every year.
One night
When I opened the door, no one looked my way.
The skilled and the unskilled alike were looking only at their own balls.
At each table, its own time was flowing.
Some nights, alone is fine.
Some nights, you want to stand at the table side by side with someone you love.
That indifference was oddly comforting.
Here, you don’t have to be anybody.
You only have to face your own ball.
Feelings alone won’t pocket a ball
At the table, excuses don’t work.
The same layout went in yesterday.
Today it missed.
Why?
What was different?
My form? My touch? Or my own breathing —
Bring your feelings to it, and the ball still only rolls, honestly.
You have to admit your own habits.
As long as you stroke the ball the way you did yesterday, you get back only what you got yesterday.
That is a quiet, but certain, defiance.
No one has to be watching.
Only the table knows.
On being yourself
The real bad boys, I suspect, don’t play pool.
The people who pick up a cue — it isn’t that they want to rebel.
It’s only that, coming here, they can return to themselves.
Nights of facing the balls alone, without a word.
Nights of laughing and shooting with someone you love.
Both were time spent on the same table.
The anger of those days was a doorway.
Not to defy anything, but to be myself.
Where defiance goes — it may have been, after all, a quiet place like this.
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