Daily Archives: February 4, 2016

February 4, 2016

Crossroads

By Tony Brown

Buddy Guy watches Jonny Lang
play a traditional constipated blues face solo.

Buddy Guy watches Ronnie Wood sliding, slinging,
posing wide armed at the end of his bars.

Buddy Guy praises them both
as he steps to the microphone:

“I don’t know how you feel
but I feel like I’m in Heaven.”

As for me, I feel like I’m seventeen again,
the age I was the first time I saw Buddy Guy

with Junior Wells: Junior all menace
and black leather, briefcase full of harps

not meant for Heaven; Buddy a benevolent
living example of why not everyone

needed a meeting at the crossroads
to tap into the Source. Still got it, too: that smile,

soft as a backwater in August. Those hands,
coaxing out a steady rain. I feel like

I’m in Heaven after having been mistreated
as he lays me to rest.

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February 4, 2016

Intro To Modern Mythology: Film Edition

By Tony Brown

Originally posted 10/19/2010.

1.
Billions of people in the world.
Your soul mate will be right next door.

2.
War, horrible in the macro,
brings forth the delicate emotions from men.

3.
The addict, once aware of her problem,
will cry as she swallows the pills.

4.
Loved ones with cancer
ennoble all those around them.

5.
Nature exists
strictly as a foil for hubris.

6.
Things from beyond this world
conform to strict rules.

7.
When love finds you,
you will be unready for it.

8.
Animals are smarter than us
in all the important ways.

9.
The force of a bullet or a bomb
can bestow the power of flight.

10.
The rich are rarely as happy
as the poor, but you will certainly be an exception.

11.
A neat ending is to be expected,
as is a lesson. Things don’t simply happen.

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February 4, 2016

Wreckage

By Tony Brown

1.
Shattered whelk shell on the shore,
brick rounded from waves alongside,
wood from ship or dock long destroyed;
algae clinging to them all says
that origin doesn’t matter anymore —
all that counts is here and now:
here, in the wreckage; now,
in the moment of wreckage.

2.
Vines are growing through
the stripped, twisted frame
of your car in the junkyard.

3.
The solstice sun strikes the stone
it is designed to strike
every year.

Or perhaps the earth
has shifted,
the megaliths have moved,
and it’s hitting 
the same unintended stone 
every year in the same spot.

4.
That sound from the beach?
My low wailing at the end
of the longest day of the year.

I’d hoped you’d be in the waves,
in what the waves bring to shore,
but I haven’t found you yet

though I’ve seized on small things
that seemed to offer hope until
I saw them in the right light.

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