The blues don’t come to you in a mist
No, the blues don’t come to you in a mist
The blues come when you dirty and pissed
Et cetera for decades of choruses
As when your whiteness disappears into blankness
As when your darkness stops answering the phone
As when your modest fame goes to cash a small
check and doesn’t return
As when your friends get bored with the plaintive notes
played too often before
Found dead in your apartment
That’s how it’s supposed to be
Oh, found dead in your apartment
That’s how it’s supposed to be
If you live the life
Then it becomes your story
You stood for how long on the burning stage
Blowing and chanting from the throbbing gut
Of pan-racial hoodoo, the appropriated blues
That left you fumbling with the half-life of smack
The black riff of hollow solitude
Love is what’s bound to go bad
Say, love is what’s bound to go bad
The woman wants what you never had
On the cover of the first album
You stood cool but earnest
As if to say, “This is Chicago.”
You couldn’t have known
How true the rhymes were,
How the song goes down slow
from Impenitent Notes (2011)
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