"Buicks"

Buicks

He loves the life of others lives
The talk of tours down beautiful rivers
And the distance your head gets in moving
His buick is the color sky sometimes makes
With grass around the tires
The oil is changed though
And he knows it’s gonna move
To find California someday
Reaching back
Recovering his fermenting sight
In the finery of alcohol
His father, taught ancient history
Doesn’t drink like him
Nor wear a belt
But his kitchen smells so good
Like the South
And the tanning of pigs
In black heavy pans
The air is edible
His father is dying though
Like the South
From tanning pigs
And something took his life too
The house sits over there now
Groaning in the weeds
A silenced out violence
Like the Roman Coliseum
But thats when they lived beside me
In 1992


Published 2002 in Penmanship magazine

The Road moved under us
Loosing the past
pass the towns
We kept the sunlight
in a photograph
Driving into the earth
in the canyons
and the deserts
driving the sands
The Highway,
your sun dress,
and a sun tan

------------this is the poem that inspired this song and video

$81

$81

Finding first your head
Lies is to talk your pillow
into being the third person
To move like the talk of the town
Through the squealing people
inflatable faces with leaks
and giants with coins
tossing their valuables to the wind
again and again
Sometimes they say the sun makes
it rain
But there on your
pillow is the first place I'll leave
my walk
Besides the Dust
and all the brooms walking around
rooms in a dance
The way I remember
the pretty barefoot
girl

The Blue Cup

The Blue Cup

I get these thoughts in angles
When he’s driving

The blue plastic cup rattled on the dash
Everything is solid now and hard

And even the radio has a spine
His life is what we’re driving around

secrecy

And I remember his face
The last time I saw where we’re driving to

He has learned to sleep beside what doesn’t love him,
Curled up in a ball, forcing out sex and youth

Around an hour now gone and this is life
With all the dulls, build up, to an enduring height

We’re traveling through faces
And time, right now, as we speak

Involving with traces of then
Closing to the arrangement of now

He could've be a father or my father
And I would've respected him

Maybe, just because he thinks it’s important
And he was famous one day or one life

Lost in that direction of fame
Winter, noon, the southern sides of states of mind

And houses looking at us in all their shades of mood
And windows handling the sun like the surface of water

We know where we’re going
Someplace that will keep us without questions
Somewhere that will forgive us for moments we let pass

A blind spot with a roof overhead
A sympathetic destination
An afterlife, where we live

One Good Wing

One Good Wing

The bald eagle was endangered
four years ago
Along the banks of Alaska

We listened to the boy talk with a massive bird on his hand
Watching us suspiciously like a dangerous predator

I bought her something rare
As rare as a 5 year old Alaskan eagle


I've learned to bring things back
As if all things are endangered
As if all things can be smoothered
Then brought back to life
in a better, more appreciated form

The eagles around the raptor center
would hobble about
some fighting the air
With one good wing
Others starred at the ceiling
Learning a new sky

When I get back to Tennessee
I'll bring a marriage back
Back to flight
And learn to forget
the other one
Who nearly drove us
to extinction

Living in Sin

Living in Sin

Today is close enough
To resemble their garden
16 years ago
Singing the value of every child they
Produced
On the vines and in the leaves
Burying songs in the ground
To come up as beautiful red tomatoes
More priceless than as money is not
Julius was southern
As southern as an antique name
And Mary Ray was his girl, not his
Wife or her husband
Proudly rebellious
By living in sin and some past idea
And making it work
Julius would bubble bottles of four roses
Balancing a guitar on his knee
(balancing a melody on his voice)
and he would write a song someday
as simple and as flawless as he would die
the one he called the money song
the one to buy the house he rents
and the one to afford him more time in the garden
working on the southern scents of roses
and Mary Ray, who this poem is about
Her caloused hands from
From picking flowers and picking guitars
I looked at the moon one night
That sat above their backyard
Like some dangling bulb from an
Electric cord
As their songs moved around me
I realized how much trees love sound
And then it was me
And I was the last thing to come out
Of their garden

1940

1940

She was the last person on earth
Whenever that song was played
(too much of a change in ideas…make a connector)

He stood over her and blocked out the light
The scene around her flooded in
And melted back down into a smoky barroom
The musicians in the corner quietly purred
Rubbing music up against the dancers
Swaying on the floor
The slow walls waved like marsh grass
The roars of a world muted out by a trumpet
A mood moved over the room
From the sway of a piano
Like a hand that rocks the equilibrium of a child
Sitting amongst the crowd
She was the last person on earth
Until the smoke made a cigarette hallo
Around his head
And the song no longer left her alone