Brien James Dawson – Two Poems

Brien James Dawson

Two Poems

The city hears nothing but the blues
                                                  for Langston and Charles

1. Somewhere downtown was a staple of conversation. Every sentence started or ended with somewhere downtown. Summer shows its face, shirts slowly lose sleeves and the skirts, they sway to the movement of jazz music. Heat hovers over you like a halo. Left alone at night, I am with the blues, the bay cat’s-paw slithers a shimmy past the old cistern, gunning my bones and I shiver. I got nothing left but living. 2. In this town, everything is pavement. A woman at a bus stop collects her hair and holds it high    the sweat shines like honey on her neck. Everyone is in heat. The marrow wakes in the pelvis, in the feet. Somewhere downtown, my shoes shuffle slow circles on concrete stairs. In my studio, late at night, the blues walks in. He looks like Langston Hughes, smokes cigarettes and blows out the saddest music you ever heard-                             not pretty, beautiful, terribly beautiful like a nuclear explosion or an old black dress falling brown shoulders. 3. When I’m with the blues, city morning feet play the pavement like piano keys and the music of our movement wakes my center and my muscles ache and swell. I close my eyes, suitably stoned, only so long can you be with the blues. On the bus, crowed Monday morning, my sadness is satiated by the girls with the knack for picking just the right skirts. skirts that sway like horns talking to each other, in slow motion walk, fabric dance with thigh, My center is soused from these small moments. 4. I hear the chaos of hurried feet when the bus door juts opens with an ah, as if to say it’s old, tired, run down, pooped. I hear the hell of other people’s conversations and I want to blast a drum suite salute into each mouth that isn’t living off this music. There are so many bandstands and bedrooms for me to make noise, still sometimes I just want silence. I just want to sleep. Stepfather blues #1 I lean down as gracefully as a man of my size can and whisper like a secret goodmorning She opens her eyes the way gods part seas and grunts, then scampers twisting towards the window. Some motherfuckers as always ice-skating up hill.

return to SHAMPOO 29