Jose Padua: The Summer of Rock and Other Fragile Ecstasies

At first it was just the summer of rock.
Every burger I ate was fast, every morning had a beat,
every hour out of school was a guitar chord no one had ever heard before.
I was ten years old or eleven though I wished I could be twenty-five.
My blood felt like it flowed through a wah-wah pedal,
and even all the strings and voices in Beethoven’s ninth
seemed to rock out until I went dizzy, until I was spinning around and around,
digging my way to the center of original Earth.
Jimi Hendrix was the real thing, and The Doors were on the car radio too,
and we rode across town with the voice of Jim Morrison, wild and cool,
but even then I thought he was also just kind of a dick.
I would have rather hung out with the fat guy Billy Stewart
who sang a version of “Summertime and the living is easy”
and made this weird beautiful bird sound with his lips that was more than enough
to show me what it meant to get high when I was a child
before he drove off the road and died
somewhere in North Carolina.
And I learned I could run, imagining I was an Olympic runner
with hands held high at the finishing line
even when I was just running out of breath
because it was the summer when I discovered
how hard it was to breathe sometimes.
Everyone could take me when it came to running for distance,
but if it was a quick dash to the bus stop,
or across the street from the old burlesque clubs on 14th Street in DC,
I could beat anyone.
Like Professor Irwin Corey I was the world’s foremost authority
of running fast for half a minute,
and back in school I could dance in class for half a minute like James Brown,
holding up my arms, swiveling my grade school hips
like the cool guys and getting smiles
from all the girls.
And there was a girl named Barbara and a girl named Vanessa
and a girl named Nancy and a girl named Dolly,
and these names all sounded like abracadabra magic to me
because I was young then and the summer of rock happened
before I was old enough to really think about all this.
Before I realized for the first time that no matter how fast I ran
or how long I danced that chance could soon force me
to leave it all behind.
Because at first it was the summer of rock,
and everyone I had ever loved was still alive
or else hadn’t been born yet.
But it was also another summer of war,
the way just about every summer is a summer of war.
And with so many dying young—
looking into battle to feel the slimy heat
bite and gnaw on their souls like bloody teeth
then never telling anyone what it did to them
or never coming back—
I wondered what I’d do when I turned eighteen.
If I’d do anything, like stop trying to breathe,
just to be able to go
the distance.

~~~~

Copyright 2025 Jose Padua

Jose Padua is the author of A Short History of Monsters, chosen by Billy Collins as the winner of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize and published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2019. Padua’s work appears in many magazines and anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2025.