MISSOURI BAR

Down on Tucker Street, the Missouri Club rules Sunday night
Girls’ night out for the whores along Jefferson and Grand
Fills the sleepless hours for alcoholic Teamsters and waiters
With jazz and blues, and escape the loneliness at the bottom

And we play the old stuff, old school, music cut on the yellow teeth
Of the Mississippi delta, cold and muddy as the waters
Flowing south along the blues highway from Chicago to New Orleans
The silt of wreck and ruin spilled across its checkered floor

Once upon a time this Mobar was America, all dolled up
In stream-lined silver and streaming neon eyeliner
Where plates filled with burgers and meatloaf were served up
By beautiful young faces in shiny, white skirts and blouses

Everyone liked Ike, and Ike liked them, even if his last name
Was Turner and not Eisenhower, her name Tina, not Mamie
And the music bubbled over like the greens simmering in bacon grease
Music, re-inventing itself with every bent note, every strained chord

Take back the seventies, eighties, and nineties, and this sand bar
Might still be the most regal queen this side of the river
But the years have been cruel to her, and even the cheap makeup
They hoist upon her, cannot hide the ugly truth, that she has cancer

And yet inside, we play like mad Scotsmen, with kilts ablaze
Wind up the saxophone, straighten out the trumpets
Let loose the Tower of Power on a city hungry for the blues
Hungry for the guitar, hungry for the wail of the harp

Hungry to feel alive, to be a part of what seems so far away
To feel love, a woman, a man dancing in your arms
The longing for touch so deeply embedded in the heart and soul
That there is little rope left to climb back, to escape

Only in a song can such magic take shape, only the notes
Falling like spiral stairs before them, beckoning them back
To the feelings of life outside the excess and consumption
Break the rocky surface, if only momentarily, and breathe deep

Sharecroppers and slaves have been replaced
By cabdrivers and office workers in chains of complacency
And they sit around our bonfire, take warmth in the flames
That the music offers them on chilly November night

Until, all that is left is the ambers of morning
Another day to face the grinding poverty and addiction
Another day to sleep alone with no thought of tomorrow
Only of so many yesterdays, come and gone

Come and gone, like the Old Man in his bank
Come and gone, like first love, first hate
Come and gone, like the chance to make it in this life
Come and gone, like the luck squandered when needed the most

Down on Tucker Street, the Missouri Club sleeps quietly Monday morning
Her breath wheezing, she hacks from too much cigarette smoke
Fills the sleepless hours with something better than loneliness and despair
Jazz and blues, painted colors in the corners of the dead, who will sleep

Until tomorrow night.

Rick Sheeley

BEYOND LIFE

If stealthy death
would tear me from your side,
I go unwillingly
Though frozen lips and flesh,
be un-responding.
Across the void
un-uttered words I'll cry,
“Good bye.” I did not leave you!
Indifferent death
has clouded all perception
This earthly realm
sets limits on a life span
In some far-off Unknown,
I know we'll meet again

Spin on
relentless countdown to Omega
Grief cares not
who it parts or when
Our essence is
in cobwebs or
in sunbeams
Beyond a molecule
or Armageddon

Suzanne Delaney

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