I have no

I have no
answers for you.

I have only this tongueless guitar.

I have no courage, no blind red-horsed charge
from beneath my quavery eyelids--

--only this crippled violin.

I have a thousand rising moonfire sonatas, Sweet Baby Midnight Blue,
but I don't know if any of them, any one of them
is for you.

Man can't cry, man can't sieze the strings and wring them,
not with arms crowding and cudgeling, not with the caged white moonlight,
Sweet Baby Midnight Blue.

Don't know what to do, Sweet Baby Midnight Blue.
I have no

I have no sonatas for you,
No answers throned in blues.
Only the quiet between mustard flowers.

There's a slow drum roll over the water, the whispered rush of violins crowding in like hurried grass. I held a vintage Hughes in my hand, and forgive me if sometimes I get sad when a dead man's lips cry out from the sweet darkness of bleary heaven.

I know they've got music there, I know they've got a band in heaven, because I have heard them stomping and thumping and romping and heaving the quiet earth about with their dusty feet. I know that they dance, and I know they lean over and take sips from the river, that they summon and arraign all their roaring passions and hold them out like firedrops running from beneath their fingernails. I know, Lord, what they do in heaven, because your hushed shuffle of violins and vintage Hughes told me so, they seared into my eyes like firedrops and gave me birth, a gasping life from the brown clay, Lord.

I cry out from the sweet darkness of bleary heaven.

Mister Hughes, will you pour water on my head?

Mister Hughes, have you got words for sorrow?
I ain't got none. No one seems to have you on their porch
Or on their shelf, nowhere where I can feel you,
Not in Taos, and not on some nigger night when the moon's been flattened
Into nickel and is brassing cheaply on the waters,
Moving on the face of the deep.

Mister Hughes, my friends are cracking like weedy midnight concrete,
And their eyes are humid St. Louis streets that cannot keep dry,
Sighing like dead black records,
And I feel them darkening like drying blood,
Mister Hughes. Why ain't you got no words for them,
Mister Hughes, where is your smoky comfort,
Where is your bitter whiskey and harsh silver microphone,
Where is your bright dress dance of ebon-flavored women
Swaying and thumbing their hips, with sweat on their calves?
Anything would comfort right now, Mister Hughes,
And they could use a drink. Haven't you got feeling, Mister,
Haven't you loved and then hung it blue-cheeked
From a dry green oak under a burning July moon,
Hung it like some poor nigger hope drying and dying,
Sapped and sobbing with the red-tongued wails
Of children with long eyelashes?

Ain't you got no words for me, Mister Hughes, for my
Friends with ripped shirts and torn undergarments,
With cuts and slashes on their slack-jawed muscles,
Screaming
Adonai, Jesus God, ain't you got no words for me?
Speak 'em sweet, Mister Hughes,
Give 'em some whiskey
For their bleeding hearts.

I do not regret today. It was quiet and good.

I am eaten by a thousand silent passions, I've got a thousand crying horns whispering like cold tin in my ears, Elvis wailing about cold Kentucky rain, makes me want to weep.

"With the rain in my shoe..."

There is so much life stuffed like stars into hushed skulls, and I love every grief-bleared drop of it, like old cold tears, herbal tea with cream on screened porches with holes in the wire.

"...searching for you..."

What should I regret? I have a moment for everything, and if I die, I die shouting cymbal-sheeted drumbeats of hope and truth, of the trembling struggles I love so much. What should I regret? Only that I could not help you see what I saw, to surge with the same fire. But hell, that's the way it's always been.

"...in the cold Kentucky rain."

I feel like saying something to every one of you. Perhaps I will. I am filled with a brazen recklessness, and these are the moods where I whip my horse and thunder down the mouth of the cannon. Unfortunately, these clatters usually resemble the Charge of the Light Brigade in the end, a bloated scattering of confusion, wreckage, and noble intentions. I want to tell every one of you, because you leap into my throat, because you are the instruments of my orchestra, you are the passions of my songs--without you, there is no music.

Jessie. You could sieze your ambition by the throat and slit the carcass open and feast on the great meats of your desires. But you are so scared of the knife you hold that it fumbles and drives its point aimlessly into the ground. I do not understand your hesitation or doubt, but trust me: what you fear you lack, you've got. You are horribly dear to my heart.

"Life is too short for doubt. There is only time for leaping." - Johnny Appleseed.

Matt. The most patient human being I have ever known. By now, I would have started slapping someone every time I heard the word "housewife." You may be too patient. Do not let your dreams choke on the dust of patience. If I don't see your name on someone's CD, "Produced by Matthew LeGrande White," within seven years, I will hang you by a guitar string. But I will never tire of talking to you; I know that I can confide in you until God hangs up his drawers on the moon.

Nicole. You would shoot yourself in the foot for a guy. I do not know if you are aware of how much you change yourself, how much you bend and sway when the man changes. You've got a core to you, an iron will and a hell of a fight that steams and hurdles like a molten child. It is the child in you that never got out, the fear and the fury and the pain and the purity that seethes and cannot be murdered. It is rare, dangerous, and a lucky thing. It is your completion, and it is your flaw. A child likes to please. You will grab hold of your humble dream, provided one thing: you don't shoot yourself in the head for a guy.

Bonnie. I can almost hear you snorting for seeing your name included. I regret not being able to say more. I brushed a surface. I brushed the same surface that you gave everyone else. There was a mask in your eyes; not a defense, but something that allowed you to look at me with your thoughts in your eyes as clear as roses, totally indiscernable. It was easy to see that they were there, but impossible to tell what they were. I will not pretend to know what inferno you are paddling inexorably through now, but I have the arrogance to think I have seen glimpses of it. I wish I had known you better. Perhaps there is still a chance...

Stacey. You are the most fragile thing I have ever touched, a strange melange of contradictions and broiling emotions taken to their utmost extremes, a vibrant and melodic symphony, violent and captivating. I think you direct a lot more fire at your mom than she deserves, but to know for sure would require a history lesson. There is blame and begging in your voice when you speak to her; your speech is loaded with a latent bitterness and undeniable need for her. You mix me up. The world is far less against you and far more for you than you think. You're going to make it, kid, but you're probably going to have to make one helluva leap.

Kyle. There's a little too much cooking in that mischievous cesspool you call a brain. You always come out sounding arrogant without meaning to, and I haven't been able to figure out how that happens, yet. You better hope your friends know how that works. Maybe they've got some remedies. I respect your passion. You've got a whole lot of it, and I like that. Don't go in half-assed. Not ever. And for heaven's sake, get out of your head. It's useful, but it has been your downfall at many a turn. You're not quite black, but you got soul. You care too much of what people think, and not enough of what they feel. Eat more greens. Fight the good fight, and always remember, son: it's about the people.

The man from Resurrection Avenue can't hear the crickets when they're battering violins against the window screens. That damned deaf man has got to go, say I.

I shot him and watched him slump tiredly with the blood rushing out of his head.

What else did you take, oh Resurrection man? Hell, I run like a mad blind red rage through the morning, thundering in a spasming chest of fear and contempt, shadowed beneath the sovereign crest of the glowering peaks, and you sweat in during the blue fire of nights that cannot breathe through their shame and touch.

You touch. And touch.

I will tune my sorrow higher, I will fume my fury hotter. I will kill you, Resurrection man, deaf man: I will be the needle in your eye. I will murder the filthy memory of you, until you lie dessiccated and shriveled on the moonless floor of an attic filled with the rot of forgotten flesh and bone.

You will not touch. You cannot touch.

I will laugh. I will guffaw in delicious amusement until my ribs crack as your flesh is flayed until it crawls like writhing worms. I will shriek with mirth when you dance on eternal coals, you damned deaf man.

Next time, you will hear the refusal.

Don't touch.

Oh bleed, bleed, scream on until, like coal tar as black as me, it thumps out from your shriveled skins and won't don't hurt no more. I ain't words, I ain't tears, I ain't black, but I am as hard as winter crows and as cold hot as passionate circles in Tuscan dust in bare damn feet and your wicker sandals--
--Was that a yellow red flower print on your white dress that was bare in smooth places, that hung and furled like a twilight maple in a Spanish wind, was it not you that stirred me, scarred me, slurred me and cried unto my burnt skin, you ain't black baby, you ain't got moves, you ain't got the jump or the shimmy or the soul--
--And I slung back, but baby I know ain't black but I am BLACK, as richly dark as the weepy terrible face of the deep, ain't that good enough for you?

what say my pale raven, what say my black, black woman of the second floor?

Say she, you crazy, damn boy, damn young bull fool, a thousand fires in yo eyes and seven thousand clattering out yo fingers and boy you got to see it--
--See what, wicker-sandal raven?
--Hell, boy, you ain't black.

--Naw girl, I as black as they get. I ain't colored with it, I ain't got the flavor, hell, I ain't even got the style. But baby, I got BLACK, you see--
I got night plastered into my flesh with tin moons flung ripe as summer oranges into my face.
I got songs twanging my bones like blue harp strings, like a porch banjo.
I got vision screeching wild as owls furrowing the warm evening with the great hunt.

And damn, baby, you can't beat that.

I put some cash in the hurry box, and found that I had squandered morning with a rush into night. I had not checked, not with velvet blinders slumped over my eyes like coffins. I greeted the doorman with a smile and a tip, and he gestured, showed me to the seat of my fiery ship. I manned the oars until my hands burned and the clouds roiled underneath with oil slick and rage.

Then I let it go.

Bring me to the lies, baby, and sell me the skinny with a thousand cigars packed between your teeth, like hissing icebergs in a darkness that curls away between the dead, parted lips of God. Throw me some hearts and grab me some souls, we'll load pockets until the lint suffocates and the living blood runs down our legs and fills our shoes.

Then I'll let it go.

Won't you let me touch you? Am I an invasion, that I should be thus repulsed and hurled back in disarray, leaving the battered field shrieking with the bloat corpses of questions whose answers have not come to gently stretcher their bloody white faces away?

Nothing. Nothing.
It is nothing.

Where, then, lies the reason? There is no shame in revelation, no pain in response. The only hurt resides in confusion, the muddy mad need for clarification with no meat to ease the cramp.

I DO NOT UNDERSTAND.