Forgotten great songs part two

Sweet Fire Of Love by Robbie Robertson (with U2). Album:Robbie Robertson

It's true: when you're a teenager, everything is about sex.

I was 16 in the fall of 1987. I had just gotten my driver's license and a beautiful Indian summer was in full swing. Robbie Robertson released his first solo album right around this time and it spoke to me. These were sexy songs, they captured perfectly the intense, giddy holiness that a teenager views sex-and much of life-with.

This song in particular really captures the mood of the album. Back in '87 it felt like jumping off a cliff into a river of cool water...or maybe a lake of fire. Twenty-three years later, my breath still catches and my heart begins to pound when I hear it.

New poem

Atlantic City, August 1979

1.

The morning fog
seperated the boardwalk
from the sea.
Only winos wanted to be on
the beach that early,
you could see them as shadows
pacing on the sand,
pretending to have concerns
and burdens greater than
the paper bag becoming too light.

2.

Children are at home in crowds,
a chance to be a mustang in a stampede,
a stone in an avalanche.

Supertramp blared from every passing car,
every open shop door,
the sun burned away the fog
and sang along to the hits.

3.

Sharks and stingrays
in a green lit tank,
small crocodile on a mossy log,
an aquarium of the defeated.

Next door,
a battered paperback of Spiderman comics hung from a bookrack just beyond my reach.

I couldn't dare to ask for it.

4.

At 8 years old,
I couldn't legally gamble,
even though I'd been taught my whole life what was at stake.

I had years,
decades even,
to learn I was in no postion to negotiate,

that we live entire lives
in the shadow of risk,
hoping our faces give nothing away,

that we hope we remain on the boardwalk and the people in the fog get taken by the sun.

9/1/10
Brian Moreau