Razor

A clogged commode, scented Cuban cologne

I grab my luggage, overheard Caribbean languages over the PA

In fading light of dying summer, oh pathetic late, transient temple of fleeting warmth

I think of that July in '99 you want me back but don't love me

You're heated orange in pretense

You cocaine crap house

Your Biscayne cigar boats.........

Razor blade cut through the blooming night

Lil' Havanna, Liberty City, Coconut Grove - I claim your hippies, I once saw Madonna there

Down to the Keys...... out to the swamp.......your bellowing green mosquito'd embers sting.

I'm not listening you 'Bastard City' - You can't have me back

I'm facing west - San Francisco way

I'm not listening - to your 'Magic City' glistening

Tis' not enough for Haight Ashbury's sway.

Restoration

It was November - the hell of angst

Teenaged spirited, unrequited love

It was 1994 - a full day's education weary road to Birmingham

In fading light I looked west.

Belinda Carlisle's 'Leave a Light On' caressed the tragedy of the trauma- that adolescent murmur

Of better wants, I-59 was slanted - Northwest

Damn, I know it - I care if you don't

I could see Coit Tower, 

The whistle hollowed chimed Jerry Rice, The 9'rs just won another title.

You red city - you demonic city.

You sexual, you artistic colonizing of colonies....dusty western colonies

My Judeo, Christian persuasions prompt me to hate you

Marrying me to Nashville, Miami, Dallas....... oh, lifeless gallery on the edge of nothings

I want everything, you're on the edge of everything

You bizarre sidewinder of western restoration, save me in one embrace

Take away Florida, humiliate Alabama

Mock the stoic, stupid hypocrisy - of 'dixieland' banal conservative thought

Oh coffin land of the unitiated, untalented

Freeze Miami - spurious blistered - orange sliced - white lined sunken backwater

With your Pacific chilled, Mark Twain' testified breeze - opiate communal delight

Protect me from all that's east - surprisingly, sinister east

Humid piss pool of drooling - languished puddles of tradition melting

as ice cream left over in false religioned tent revival seats- no one here approves of you

Save for the truest, journalist in me

Oh, Golden Gate - I'm the lover you've found - In a North Beach's sunset tranquility.

J.C.B.

8/28/2021

Slag Whistle (Noccalula Mountain Lullaby)

Tracks vibrate 

Humming rhythm

Pumping Alabama City

Fleetwood Mac's Little Lies plays tuned.

They say there's Satan worshipers up

on the hill

Ole Tabor Road

Where witches once shrilled

Philip almost threw up

exhausted, child like exertion

The city swim meet up at Scenic will do that

El Debarge's Who's Holding Donna Now

Hums like the train track in Alabama City below

On demon's mountain mist

On witches mountain mist

I was listening to some old songs from the 1980's that reminded me of the other side of town.  Late summer always purveyed the 'City Swim Meet' before we all headed back to school.  My brother and I lived and swam competitively in the more affluent part of town at the local country club. Our neighborhood was called 'Country Club Mountain and Clubview. We'd swim for the country club against a club called Wild Haven, The Gadsden YMCA (ironically my brother and I swam for the Y during the winter months) and The Scenic Highland Swim Club at that City Swim Meet.  Scenic represented the rough and tumble Lookout Mountain community of Noccalula Falls.  That community always mesmerized me.  Gadsden sits in a valley between our neighborhood situated on the Green Mountain chain and it's surrounding hills and my friend Philip's neighborhood -Lookout Mt (foothills or Appalachian Mt. chain).  Philip and I would compare which mountain was taller.  The Lookout Mountain neighborhood kids were our rivals in childhood swim races and then in high school as my neighborhood was zoned for old Gadsden High as they were old Emma Sansom.  My best friend in grammer school, Philip lived up on 'The Mountain.'  There were always tales about Satan worshipers and witches and honestly, some of it was true.  My community was dubbed by experts to have the top three highest incidences of Satanic activity in America.  Regardless, hearing old music brought me back to that simpler time when I swim against Philip and then would go spend the night with him in the fall and watch the 'The Goonies'  The 80's were a magical time artistically.  A time when people still congregated and the world was a more hopeful place.  Even the 'dark side of town' was lovingly seen as ominous yet accommodating.  In that decade even darkness was lighter than it is today.  The yellow and purple graphics is an ode to old Emma Sansom High School. The school zoned for all our Noccalula Mountain rivals. I can't forget El Debarge playing on the radio after an exhausting swim meet leaving Scenic behind.

J.C.B.

 

'Vapored' (Burbank 2021)

Breeze filled spaces

fever, filled face

oven baked heat

dried upon ghostly

whispers from

Universal Studios

dried up as dust

trash, puke, dreams

of Echo Park, Sunset Boulevard

Oh to sit in this haven

Burbank shelter

sweltering sun

seeming animate

impossibly departed all in one

In the stillness of this reclusive respite

Tomorrow's my flight

via Bob Hope Way

Oven valley sun purifies boorishness

A hotel pool cools exhaustion

A City of Angels purveyed. 

 

'Chalk'

A requiem of late summer exhaust

Feeling heat's intensity wane

Signaling a dying seasons autumn into a coming one

Oh, chalky month, as taste

like a piece of 'Mamba' candy

August - you stir my soul - as twilight

Destin, Tuscaloosa sun setting

blue green, sandy horizon pale

lifeless as summer has become

of heaped hills of college chime bells - bellow

a chalky taste to my senses, to my soul is August

dusky saint of languid dreams

J.C.B.