Whiskey and Thunder

Moonlight bleeds to the suitcase by the door,

Packed full of promises we've broken before

Whispers of summer hang silent and low

Like the breath between words I don't want to know

55 stretches out like a wound in the earth

Your silence the song that tells me of my worth

But I hear it all around me down each fateful mile 

Down highways without you, while I fake a smile. 

Burning down bridges but God how we loved

Like whiskey and thunder, we're never enough

Tangled up, messy, like barbed wire and skin

Can't tell where your heart ends and my ache begins

The wind is your absence, your voice lost to me

Echoes of promise, of something set free

Memories dancing like leaves on the ground

Spinning and falling but making no sound

And I know every scar that we've carved in the night

The beautiful darkness, the terrible light

How we're drawn to each other like a storm to the plain

Like mercy and madness, like love and its pain

Some nights I think maybe we're storm clouds disguised

Two tornados spinning, lost in the skies

But I'd chase you down dirt roads, broken and wild

Like a prayer without mercy, like a motherless child.

River of Forget

Grey, cold spells on the Delta are requiems.

Fitful sleep and purpose wrapped together

in one lonely dream while the Blues speaks it all –

screaming souls and pale guitars wail until morning,

a devilish provocation of want, and want, and want.

If you could hear the insatiable songs

in these crumbling houses surrounding us,

and feel the moans at midnight

of God's love and all its punishment –

you'll see the mud and desperation flowing

down the banks of the Mississippi,

down the river of forget,

down the nightmare-grieved cheeks of children

waking from bursts of lightning at midnight.

Magic Deconstructed

Urine and jazz saturate the stairwell

between Union and the Mississippi,

A cross-rhythm syncopation of fresh

ammonia against augmented 7th,

stalemate of crass and class in the heat of

a burning and half-diminished sun.

True steps beating in time-feel, sweatlaced and

consuming what remains of the lost day,

fly swiftly toward an exit—one-two

pattern of converses and stars in a

place where the sales pitch is darkened, replaced

jaded by the realest real of them all.

Beneath shadowed Agave Maria,

Summer’s heat creeps soft into the city,

And balancing like a stone torrent smooth,

Waiting against the current for magic

to interrupt the dark chambers of self,

I embrace what is with abandon:

Deconstruction, cynicism, pathos—

all rummaging through ilk of cicadas

in human form, moving nymphlike from ground

to sky then back again with hollow shells

in their wake, machine whirring overhead,

night song written, then sung, then vanished