Listen to Bruce Bond read his piece:
And in those final moments as he played
with fire, remember the thread he poured,
clear as music, over his paisley Strat.
Remember how he knelt to coax the static:
a stunt, he would admit, and it worked,
the way fire works to make us talk.
It destroyed a perfectly good guitar,
the kind boys covet, to lead us, where?
into spectacle, smoke, less than smoke.
The genius of the young is how they grow
younger as we age. The day the sun
devours the earth, history is no heaven.
More of a film lodged in its projector.
Just like fire to eat the memory of fire,
the body drowned in wine the morning after.
If it’s true, that death is a mother,
if all we own begins where it ends,
in silence, which is the greater flame, the thing
that embodied us, or the song it sings.