Ballad of a Tuba Player
I'll tell you the tale of a man I once knew
Whose sad story still grieves me even to this day.
For years, he played tuba in so many bands
In a half-ruined school all those long miles away.

Where the brick turned to dust, he worked his hands raw.
In the sweltering band room he sweated, he swore.
Years of wear fell off every tuba he touched
As he labored over them on the grimy floor.

He was first to arrive at every concert,
Walking in the gloom of the still-empty house there,
Lifting weights it was thought that no other could move
Except for a woman with a gold mist of hair.

He didn't just play out his soul on the stage.
Every daily rehearsal, he thundered and roared.
Though the weeks ground like millstones, through sickness and floods,
Over dust, over heat, his song always soared.

He ruined his shoulders; he ruined his back,
But the love of it that burned in him never waned.
He had so much trust in his band directors,
And I hope that they know how their hands are now stained.

He was good at making new tuba players,
So they kept him in lower bands and made him teach.
His reward for showing the young ones how to play
Was to have all advancement kept out of his reach.

Each year they told him it would be the last time,
He'd stop being held back for this reason, they swore.
Each April, like clockwork, they said the same thing:
That they desperately needed him there one year more.

He loved the section leader in the top band.
Though they yearned every day to be with each other
They were kept as distant as the poles; their chance
To play together they will not recover.

They bounced him between lower bands as needed
Until a new teacher felt his ensembles could
Get by without those who were their steel backbone
And broke them in the name of what he said was good.


When he was caught in nets of red tape, not one
Of those he served, body and soul, would stand by him.
No band director would defend their willing
Slave, and to let their man hang was their heartless whim.

Now he finishes his diploma in dark,
Beneath a shopping mall, so far from all the friends
He had in better days, left with the fading
Hope of salvaging something from a million ends.

They left him with his sorrows and the haunting
Memories quick to goad him, slow to disappear
And the specter of a fierce, green-eyed woman
To whom he knows he will never again draw near.