Steve Brisendine

Confession, Frehley Offered

Forty-whatever years on from when
he owned a quarter-share of the world’s
spiked metal throne, I can dig the goofy

streetwise genius, the way slop and flash
danced and stumbled and danced again
up and down that Les Paul fretboard

in boozy pentatonic abandon, Chuck Berry
via the Bronx by way of a fifth of cold gin.
Now I hear those bends and divebombs

for what they were: manic, whacked-out,
Ain’t life a party, man? cackles electrified
and howled out through Marshall stacks.

But when I was fourteen, I only tacked
his concert poster on my headboard
as a small safe act of good-Baptist-kid

rebellion, one to raise eyebrows – or at
least one eyebrow, but not too high.
You know the image, if you’re my age:

Ace leaned back into a sustain, right hand
off the strings, dummy Humbucker pumping
out stage smoke, the comet-cool apotheosis

of the Spaceman – but deep down I really
wanted to be Gene, to spit fire and blood
and baritone gravel, to flash finger-horns

at the God seats in some weed-fogged
hockey arena, flick a freakish tongue
over black snarling lips and get all the girls.

Steve Brisendine lives, works and wrangles words in Mission, Kansas. His most recent poetry collections are Salt Holds No Secret But This (Spartan Press, 2022) and To Dance with Cassiopeia and Die (Alien Buddha Press, 2022), a “split collaboration” with his former pen name of Stephen Clay Dearborn. His first collection, The Words We Do Not Have (Spartan Press, 2021) was nominated for the Thorpe Menn Literary Excellence Award. He is a two-time finalist for the Derick Burleson Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in Flint Hills Review, Modern Haiku, Connecticut River Review and elsewhere.