I’m happy to announce that my first poetry collection, The Blackened Blues, is available wherever you buy books (yes, *wherever*, so you don’t have to put more money in Rocket Man’s pocket; you can go directly to my publisher, Finishing Line Press, or support my pals (and 1455 partners) at D.C.’s The Potter’s House).
THE BLACKENED BLUES is part of a large and ongoing project that discusses (and celebrates) some of the author’s personal heroes who remain far less celebrated than they deserve to be. As it happens, many of them are musicians, hampered in various ways by discrimination, ranging from old fashioned racism to institutional and cultural indifference. Though there’s an elegiac sadness suffusing these poems, there’s also acknowledgment of defiant genius: they fought their battles bravely, in their art and in their lives. This collection seeks to capture something (or, hopefully, more than a few things) essential about their lives, bearing witness while also paying homage.
I’d like to introduce the collection, one poem at a time (in the order they appear in the book), and tell a little bit about the inspiration for each, by way of explanation and in tribute.
Next up is “Tina Turner’s Legs,” which I offer up with maximum love, humility, and the whitest possible self-deprecation.
Tina Turner’s Legs
Those thighs could crack your back
like a peanut beneath a pair of pumps.
Or slice your head off like freshly-shaved
scissors, and you’d lick them like lollipops,
in awe and almost insane, a dream cum true.
No, video is good as it’ll ever get—and
that’s good enough: you wouldn’t even
begin to know how to handle those miles
of succulent straight lines, lost in darkness,
delirious; look but don’t touch or better
yet, just listen. There’s a lot you could learn:
the thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone,
the hip bone’s connected to the back bone…
Look at them. Walk a mile in those heels:
Muscle and rhythm and the brutal love
of harmony. You have to be strong to bear
that body of work. You carry that weight
long enough and the burden becomes a kind
of blessing, at least in the eye (and especially
the shy, shaking hands) of the beholder.
Take a deep dive into this river and come
out on the other side of the mountain, high.
We always try to kill what we can’t control;
that’s a whole history of colored commentary.
Black and blue, the blackened blues of beautiful blackness.
Listening and looking, thirsty like a lush
in a liquor store, but this kind of sweetness
could kill you—and you’ll die tasting brown
sugar on your tongue, panting like Pavlov’s
bitch, kissing those boots, holding out hope
that one day soon they’ll walk all over you.
