The Night After the 2016 Presidential Election I Tried to Find a Bar Playing Billy Joel’s Piano Man. by J.B. Stone

I know he hated

to play this song live,

I know if he heard this song

played in a bar

he would cover his ears

press his palms tightly

and plead to the bartender

to turn this song off,

but nothing sings the ghosts

of old sailor shanties

quite like a 20th century rendition

these were the songs one toasts hope to

in the darkest of times

where the coastlines

and the fresh harbor air

no longer invoke

the same moment

and in a new era

where propaganda

swallows its nation whole

the populous is in need

of a new national anthem

we hold our mugs and pints

and sing to a muffled chorus

drunk like it’s our last night on earth

trying to find gospel in the draft dispensers,

holy water in the tap reserves

almighty Billy Joel!

distill these broken hearts

and try to pump them with the will to live

regardless of a world that is constantly burning

J.B. Stone is a neurodiverse fiction writer/poet from Brooklyn, now residing in Buffalo, NY. Stone is the author of the Micro-Chap, A Place Between Expired Dreams And Renewed Nightmares (Ghost City Press 2018). He has work featured and/or forthcoming in over a dozen publications including Cadaverous Magazine, Ghost City Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, In Between Hangovers,Occulum, Crack the Spine, Riggwelter Press, Breadcrumbs Magazine,BlazeVOX, among others.