“Just sit and listen”, he’d tell us.
“Dancing’s for fags and tall boys who don’t know how to tell stories”.
And the 88 black and white keys would lay balanced in front of him,
patiently waiting to help illustrate the tale.
His finger bones worked his hustle,
bending and reaching for the words,
shaping similes,
dipping under the odd idiom
and sketching out heavily pencilled metaphor.
A semicircle of drunken illiterates sat bent and swaying,
drifting into the days concluding fake believe,
wrapped up warm in a sleep shaped lullaby
more sweet than their own mothers mellow mewing’s.
Strings felt the felt,
hammered to their yawning song,
fingertips tapping rhythms like a
Morse code poet
(“If anybody’s receiving this,
we got cold beer and tobacco.
Bring women.”).
Quiet choruses of hand on hand on knee approval,
a slow bowled request sharply batted down
under
fading “Fuck you”s.
And now clear space for
a quiet voice someone remembered was theirs,
neck stiff, tightly letting out air,
the way a white man sings,
holding like with both hands,
as though it was the first girl he found
he couldn’t just bump.
One for his baby,
the funny valentine,
found slouched and pouting in a frame on the fauxhogany planks of the upright,
next to a tumbler of shop brand scotch
we placed on a pedestal just to piss out.
My best memories got typed up in those 88 keys,
punched inky relief’s, dusted off in second hand poster paper
(one side for you, one side gone with the has been),
carving the curves the 26 alphabet letters weren’t enough
to tell the whole truth of,
while my shoed feet danced silently,
leading my oil paint partner under a trailing spot light.
© Dave Selby 2012
