DB Cox- Three Poems

BIO:
DB Cox is a blues musician/writer from South Carolina. He grew up in a
Southern Baptist Orphanage in Greenwood, SC. He graduated from high school
in 1966, and joined the Marines Corps right after the Vietnam TET Offensive
in 1968. After being discharged in 1972, he spent several years playing
guitar in bars, juke joints, and honky tonks across the South. In 1977, he
moved to Boston, Massachusetts to attend the Berklee School of Music where
he discovered a thriving blues scene. After thirty years of playing the
music he loves, he moved back to South Carolina where he writes and plays in
a blues band called “P.C. Red & Almost Blue.” Check out his Kindle EBook of
short stories called "Unaccustomed Mercy--available at Amazon Kindle EBooks.


good saint shane
---for Shane McGowan

holding tight
to a mic stand
lifeline
cigarette smoke
rising
from a shaky
right hand
pushing perfect songs
past a death-rattle
diaphragm
good saint shane
stumbling
toward grace
pissing
in the face
of the “everyday”
half-burnt brain cells
still flaring
across that magic
black box
half-cocked laugh
crackling
like static
from a broken radio
rock & roll water walker
playing out
the implications
of his holy part
peter pan poet
with a metronome heart
that keeps on beating
because it can


supernatural fire

dim lights float
in cigarette smoke
a saxophone cuts
through the haze
like lightning
at sundown
notes drop
into impossible places
then somehow
slip out gracefully
a bebop poet
gone a little mad
machine greased
with drugs and whiskey
to kill the edge
of feeling too much
balanced on a ledge
a highwire walker
conjures a vertigo
of living color
out of this black hole
of 3 a.m. sorrow
lighting
this murky space
with a supernatural fire
that burns for awhile
then goes cold


passing for blue

d.k. died last year
in a 24-hour store--
shot by some shaky kid
when he walked
in on a 50 dollar holdup
to buy a pack of marlboros
he was a bluesman
he knew more
about robert johnson
& tampa red
than amiri baraka
or leroi jones
he used up
most of his time
& all of his options
preaching to the blue
multitudes jammed
into cheap neon
playgrounds along
the whore-haunted streets
of late-night america
where no accusing eyes
ever questioned
the heartfelt disguise
he wore for forty years--
& on the day
his ashes were
tossed toward
the rain-polished sky
there were no
bands playing
no sad fans weeping
no sanctifying poetry
from langston hughes
just a southbound
breeze to ride on
for a white boy
passing for blue