AN EASTER PRAYER

Hold On

Tom Waits | MySpace Music Videos

Something about this sepia-toned, sheet metal, dustbowl, fever dream and these ramshackle words of encouragement from a gravel-throated hobo ghost that makes me say "Amen!" this Easter morning. It's not just an obvious weakness for blondes and Cadillacs, or film noir, or even Marilyn Monroe, who died for our sins, or even a damn fine melody--but something past all that, something harder to pin down, something like the distressed beauty you might find in a paint-peeling gas station or an old rusted water pump, or a set of worn-out Burma Shave signs in the high dessert, or a beat-up steel string guitar, a thousand yard stare, taillights fading on the hitcher's highway at dusk, that hollow metallic feel of a bus station after midnight, or an all-night diner, boilermakers and ashtrays and old magazines and Easter eggs in your lunch sack, more like the cold comfort of looking a little deeper, past all that hard plastic American razzle dazzle to find a dog-eared leaf of poetry blowing down an empty alley. They threw the poet off the roof, you know, and you can hear the sirens growing louder. Better we get out of here, sweetheart.