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for Tony Parsons

History of Sensation 5
Twentieth Century Blues 1

Let it all go. As I sing I drive my
dynamite for some strange machine
of this nearly spent century;
the big city calls its sinful
numbers heaven. My fast rolling
kisses are for the stern
lady, dodging me, back of the beat.
Our harp player’s dead - when Pete
told me, we laughed. A quick shimmy
was Elzadie’s goodnight; buttons and
belt loosening, Arvella’s swift farewell.

Pete’s 12 string steam whistle leaves town;
I want you to take my place in this song.
Elzadie lifted her hem and smiled, as he
tuned to an open chord. Bending G on the E,
the dog jumped into the horn as
the KC moaned, with a mocking beauty
mating rabbit foot dreams. Arvella slumped in
the shade, feeling contempt, thinking: give me
the train’s shake. Sweat rolled off
transport as delight, a nervous fix
in this thief’s paradise of form and
necessity possessed by devils. He’d
rehearsed all morning, restless,
couldn’t wait to start again, to howl
out, temporal and grounded, “We’ll never
get out of these blues alive” -
above the frets, trembling. Inside:
shared diction, dancing voices, mojo stomping,
good book palms together in prayer. At night
she wedges the chair against the door,
feels evil thrashing outside the room,
but can’t connect the pose of his
arpeggio muscles above her, de-tuning
slackening; sings down the phone:
“Take my lonesome love in hand.”
Dancing with her to the juke band,
his tense fingers practise chord shapes
up and down her spine; to be a real person:
a girl adjusting her skirt, singing Twentieth
Century Blues, a pearl on her lips, - her devil
astride two chairs, playing slide
with a Coca-Cola bottle. She
is about to say something over the
gossamer telegraph line, to survive
his strong hands rambling through.

Kid Bailey’s the name I travel with, kidding
around: the name on the only phonograph;
walked up to the shop window, the glitter
of the diamond-fretted Dobro a death squad
tuning up. My handkerchief shields
the chord shapes from
your thieving eyes. Just pull the razor
and shave him. The gun in the guitar case was
no use - jealous man stepped up to Charley
as if to ask for Pony, retuned. Bill-
boards tell women what
to be: a circle of music-stands
dreaming thrills, dancing the Shimmy-She-Wobble -
some guy called it a dry fuck -
the guitar dances too, spins
above Charley’s head. I could see
my own rapt reflection in the shine,
an invisible piano whose pedals are moody
bendings. Love my suitcase and the road.

Arvella’s choked voice in his drowned
throat was only a name in a song. Late
capitalist machines filter hiss from old records.
White rooster corrugations beckoned Elzadie.
He looked at her empty shoes and built her up -
songs for gone Elzadie as he held
his guitar like an old woman he’s just
drowned in the gutter. Arvella scowled
as I played his body, a piano’s
grin, strategic melodic outburst. Suddenly
slashed Charley’s throat, his light face
blackened to hell. Arvella leaned
against a tree waiting for the voice-thrower,
weeping as he watched. Dancing
flat against him, rising, I wanted him,
his cracked voice. Pretty girl, Bertha Lee,
a lot of Charley’s singing for him, I thought.
Broken guitars above our heads, a scrapyard ceiling,
his breath on the damp trails he’d laid
on the backs of my legs. You could
make a plastercast of his hands,
real cobwebs playing host to a toy.
My skirts are grinning. His voice
is inside my sky, over the radio. Off
with nothing but my guitar and my name -
never played Rowdy Blues one time too many
the same barrelhouse. I spotted clichés every
inch of her body, chain-gang eugenics, a prison
which took your name. My thumb
print on his photograph; his words
want to lick me into the present - the tense
Son House always uses to speak of him.
Coming out of the Dark Road, the Silver Moon,
they look me up and down as though
I have subverted planking, beauty
that feeds of f ugly draughts, a clinical
breakage in an imperial history. Pay
me faster, pay me cash, I carry you faster,
pay hot-love/hard-luck hobos who ride
the station wall. Dropping the needle was like
opening a door on his last jukehouse, nine-
teen sixty; old place I go, leaves trembling….
When our harp player killed himself, he wrote
a three page suicide note, took a massive
no-mistakes overdose. Hold that woman I’m loving -
she’s taught me to howl out the blue devils.

Suck the dominant zero of my shabby
industry! It’s unacceptable trade,
sounds organised like oil-drums in a
car-wrecking yard. Guitar shell
across the knees, a glance
on the intricate drive toward death,
silence of too much music, condensed
like a dream in the assassins’ streets.

My new harp wrapped in sore lips surges
in the body like the striped diesel bulleting
past that note before the fourth verse,
strings for the high wind to play silent,
gauging the tonic, fanning my hand
in the music’s shell. We glowered
at each other, throwing shadows, our barrelhouse
quiffs turning from the keyboards. His hands
and my body spun web between the brothers.
Pete’s guitar yearns a void,
cleanhead parody, suddenly chokes,
as she sings, accompanied by a trace of him,
driven to silence, floral phonographs on a coffin.
Arvella’s face glowed, as the match flared. He
held it for a moment, glanced lazily, the ear
knowing the next chord pushed back to the dominant
and its rhyme, a limb floating the crowd.
Paralysed down one side now, Elzadie’s
eyes had been splashed with tears,
the sounds of Cadillac death; Arvella’s voice,
sweating the world it’s breathed, his
teeth crowned gold. She’s not seen Arvella -
the gasoline blowing back gusts above the
flames. She could still see the charred
frame of the cabin, blistering, red-hot, in the smoke,
and thought: that’s over and the dream book’s
closed, the strings nearly as dead as me.
Elzadie bit her lip, trembled, silent. What
stops the dissonance, the mad tears?
Dancers swim in my sound, here beyond
exchange, out of a deeply controlled accident.
The Schlitz sign was broken, flickered
as the dancers looked at her empty shoes
while I sang. Precision in the slither,
fixing mimetic fingers. He’d held the
guitar close to his body like a dancer,
trains re-coded as the soft roll
of her body, sparse wires following the track
more faithfully than a man will follow his love.