a poem
Ode to Otis
my love song to his
“Sitting on the dock of the bay, wasting time.” Otis Redding
Let’s sit on the dock and lay waste to time, tossing blue rose petals of bon voyages into the bay.
Let’s set every should, every shouldn’t sailing — christening each with bottled up effervesces of relief, lifting our faces to the intoxication in Now’s wake, resisting the urge
to jump in after and clamber dutifully on board.
Or, like the blue rose, is this genetically impossible, a raft of thorns struggling to stay afloat overloaded as it is with fear’s flotsam –
the ten people telling you what to do
a blindness to the phosphorescence within your seas, so heavy you’ve already drowned?
©Jenine Bsharah Baines 2021
When I read James G Brennan’s tanka, In Love with Paradise, a response to Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她)’s prompt What’s your love song? I knew I needed to write an ode to Otis Redding.
As a people/schedule pleaser extraordinaire, Otis’s song is my emancipation manifesto.
Thank you, Lucy, for a wondrous prompt and thank you, James, for calling my attention to it.
Dearest readers, thank you for wasting some time with me as the ocean called Medium laps against the dock. (Thomas Plummer, thank you for Are You Hiding Your Dreams, which urged me on while writing my ode.)
