| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
MISSOURI BAR
Rick Sheeley
(About Poetry Forum)
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Sharecroppers and slaves have been replaced
By cabdrivers and office workers in chains of complacency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.
THE TEST
Diane Hamilton
(Cafe Utne)
“Use it in a sentence.”
What? Use what in a sentence?
“Hirsel.”
“She took hirsel(f) too seriously.”
If this was a test
I would pass it my way.
But what I really wanted to do
was drop kick him into tomorrow.
“No, hirsel,” he said again
as if it were the reprise of his favorite hymn,
“meaning to arrange in flocks.”
I thought of tiny morsels on a plate
little bits of cheese and cracker crumbs
moving them around, herding,
no hirseling them.
Of course, I didn't say it aloud.
I imagined the inside of his head
as a great cavern,
not entirely empty but with
a few jewels embedded on the bottom
lovely diamonds if you could only pry them loose.
He was still waiting,
tapping on the desk,
waiting.
I began slowly,
weighing every word.
“At night she went to sleep
by counting sheep, starting at 100
and counting backward but never reaching zero.”
I asked if a paragraph would be okay
and when he nodded grimly,
I continued. “When she finally
fell asleep, she dreamed the dream
of the faithless. Sheep wandering off on their
own, tripping over rocks, tumbling from cliffs, alas,”
Oh no, he's rolling his eyes now,
I shouldn't have said alas.
“there was no Good Shepherd there for
hirseling.”
About the InterBoard Poetry Competition
Archive of IBPC Winners
First Place Winner, December 2001
