RD Armstrong, the editor, wants everyone to know how much he's enjoyed putting this collection together; and how he appreciates the patience of all involved. He claims he's always been a blues man at heart. He's been muttering this sentence for years. "It's all about the TONE - not the pigment, the vibration!"
Special thanks to the poets: Jim "Jazz" Chandler, David Crittendon, Clabe Hangan, Linda Lerner, John Macker, Errol Miller, Tony Moffeit, Todd Moore, Val Sigstendt, Jimmy Smith, Rick Smith, Scott Wannberg, Lawrence Welsh, and A.D. Winans, Yazoota...and old RD, himself.
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Publishor: Lummox Press © 2000
World rights reserved -- Use only with publishor's written permission
Little Red Book Vol. 28
ISBN 1-929878-29-X
Pages: 48
Cost: Six Dollars (includes Postage & Handling)
the poem by Todd Moore was shit but the guy backing the poet was playing a sweet quitar riff that had me searching for robert johnson i knew the color of death in a glass of bourbon & swam in the black rain bow of a colt 32 The Blues Name Their Daughter Ursula by John Macker Miles glares at me with those October eyes from the kitchen wall, holds a pink baby in his thin fingers, seems to be saying as I put on my boots, a second cup of breakfast tea, "Random is not a function" followed, I think, by a North Atlantic expletive. As I float down the highway in a flood of yellow light, the continent retreating out from under me the space between mesa-edge & mist looks like a thin-lipped smile. The news says due to drought the bears are coming down this year & at that point I feel more than a simple affinity with them, both of us hanging white-knuckled from the same civilization less than holy but more than innocent. The radio astrologer then says "Taureans, if you were born today, you are kind of blue, you won't hit a half- starved black bear with your Mitsubishi but someone in time & space will & the moon with all of its pink houses will still rise. full." Twenty Notes Gone South by RD Armstrong remember those beer-stained nights of rompin', out-of-focus blues when couples squeezed onto crowded dance floors to dance the crazy-legged be-bop & jive, or jumpin' at the woodside, or doin' the crosstown, las' chance fo' romance- closing-time boogie. remember the band hittin' the ninth refrain runnin' like a roundhouse haymaker findin' its mark sweating under red and blue lights while everyone was hypnotized by the big man on the mic, always dressed in a suit, Chicago-style hair slicked back remember how the big man never took off the shades even at night, even as he slept, perhaps. remember how he worked so hard hunched over cupping his instrument pulling it into himself grunting and shouting sweat pouring off his brow blowing his soul into and through ten-holes turning twenty notes into a vocabulary of sighs and moans like a mile-long, south-bound freight pulling its tired load of joy and sorrow over Breakheart Pass. remember the big man driven onwards always William Clarke is dead twenty notes gone south, gone home to rest let us pause and remember RAMON'S by Lawrence Welsh strip off the names like buick 8 or chrysler king and hide on peidras stretch some shade is visor low or 22 caliber spider holes up the drag the cinco puntos travails to central el paso blue but back a rolling door a pot of joe a crescent wrench to turn the night singing in her nerves by Tony Moffeit coyotes drank the shadows while she moved that was her secret all she had to do was feel the blues she sought the outlaw on nights when the moon howled and a drumbeat pulsed in her veins she sat in the corner booth in the back of the saloon in the wildness of her silence in the ghost dance of her disappearance the leaves shook outside the window the darkness became her blood the roadhouse jumped with her rhythm coyotes drank the shadows while she moved that was her secret all she had to do was feel the blues
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