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Smokestack Lightning 2
Midnight Ride 2
Unwritings 7
Twentieth Century Blues 53

I would have preferred to sing the blues in any small bar full of smoke than to spend the nights of my life scratching into language....

Alejandra Pizarnik

I

Sonic topology of certain unbearable blues threatens to turn out into Kingston. Suits shine with human contact notes set up with yet another rehearsal rolling. I look unlikely in this accelerated context: Chris and Tony unload vinyl. Thrash ear-pressed harmonica plays the rainy drive, caverns filling with noise and satellite TV cutting the night into uneven strips. A monstrous chord fills the room bounces back and forth across the lips programmed under flat-out Capitalism the leisure to read poems. Pulling it played the last time for Duster Bennett.

II

Flesh and blood miked catching itself. More with the body coming up to peak, sweet. Help me as memory in sweaty dreams lacks signings to pink shows, coming home tired (to Tooting). Elzadie’s noise off again lost in finger skills catching herself in time as in sex concentration upon images themselves without howling where is she? brash chorded little-voiced harmonica ears hardly hear her felt so bad with his intention-equivalents that she devastates and overtakes. “Then vote something else! Or nothing.” 

III

Playing is literacy prettily missed. Silent vibraslap in Chris’ gloved hands, my gaze slo-mo, turning Harmony-manager. Convention joke’s not played a mysterious youth power recaptured. Middle musics rescued our time in the room to “do” the total songness. Antiquity’s waste burns timely in a de-vinyl belted raincoat economy! I miss the riff Peter Hope-Evans puts to bed for me. It’s one instrument, it’s two: yet others say six! Homunculus! Three-quarters mattress will do it: cliché errors in however wherever no-time styles.

IV

No time for listening I haven’t sung. I cannot write from Hambone’s vehicle, fingers on the fretboard, soft, lost in image. (I take 2.) I’ve been helped minutes before writing this stolen by 1936. We play in versions as two keys act a voice (simply) through me. Reverent reverberations laugh compensate with the stocking tops of Mussolini’s granddaughter. Roses on harps confirm my perceptions with time phantoms not dissipative with Charley Patton tuned sky high! Haunted with grace I hear the liquefaction of the hangover trying on an ethnomusicological wheeze: piles of out of tune harps on Sonny Boy’s grave.

V

This remote narrowcast we called Arvella in monochrome as he pulled it from Elzadie with excitations of the wide-eyed sweet thing. Documentarists play years awaiting lucrative tears as smut never proved their probity to Willie Mae. Gutted carpets fit the manager like Labour Party posters sealing self-absorbed imperial shines. We’ve had enough. She weeps regally as Britannia sails from the only colony she has left: the British People.

VI

Listening to Tony sing, refunctioned into Briggflatts (reading after the gig), tingles each time I mime, sheer jam swung guitars swept the floor between the Out of Date and History: hereabouts Every Day; you’ll find me talking to myself, downtown, like somebody else. I’m forcing myself to not imitate burnt-out words in my heart, as Peter Green realised every time.

VII

If the wind should change, then fiduciary belongings amount to two dozen diaries. This romance surrounds you, this late century blues in an unplayable pack of quotations in quotes; crude effects play oddments’ tricks. They’ve got another bill, poisons of crimes, looking from musician to musician, transposing keys: a guerilla tactic somebody’s aching fingers will track and hammer to death, night after day after night.

VIII

Blown lament returned laughing nor did Jo Ann Kelly’s dead arm blues. Courage spools travelling blues squeezing eroticism rambling through your smooth voice at its last letter’s elementary harmonica stance. Sung in Snug. Used its riff, listening walls shake with style-rut not barrelhouse; inexpressive as the wine-dark riverside.