After Bruce
By Laurinda Lind
I wasn't allowed to like Bruce Springsteen,
but then I remarried and we took all
the kids to a concert in a sports stadium
where he did what he always does, got exuberant,
got incandescent. He was already with Patti
by then and she was onstage too, he has this
long Whitmanescque catalogue song where he
lists everything he loves and he slid to his knees
looking right at her singing the goddess of sex
or maybe something even steamier and she just
shook her head a little like to say, you see how
he is, I can't control him. So the kids had never
heard anything like him, they were school-age
and ran around behind our tier of seats, but
it was okay since there was no one back there
to annoy. Then next weekend with their father
I imagine he complained about the year we were
in college when all that played anywhere was
Born to Run and how it was like Springsteen
was singing around a mouthful of marbles,
but I will tell you he wore us all out that night.
He's like Willie Nelson, once he gets going he
stops when he drops. I would like to think
it was a way my children learned they would
outlast their marathon of two dads and two
moms and never again living in only one house,
how that loads so much more into you than
you ever expected and the only valve is your
voice, so you use it at the top of your lungs
for as long as you are still alive.
This poem first appeared in Paterson Literary Review (2026) as an Honorable Mention winner in their 2025 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards.
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