MEMPHIS BLU-GLO by Timothy Resau

Life's lizards are so bizarre,

and if Beale Street could talk  America would be a better place.
Even now the distant blues echoes across the Mississippi,
dying out over lazy Little Rock.
Early summer rain clouds cross and re-cross the Delta,
raising Cain and cotton in the humid air,
as B.B. King's Opus cuts the evening    
like a comb thru thinning hair.
            
Several Day-Glo artists, home from Europa,
are seen along the burnt-out curbs,
sketching abstract letters with broken neon.
While on a corner, a wandering woman, late forties,
with blue cross tattooed on her forehead, passes out cards with:
Get Back, Too Normal— printed on them in blue letters.
    
— Only in America, says the cab driver, Mr. Johnson, 
who accepts passenger calls twenty-four hours-a-day 
from an all-night inner-city blues bar.
It's a non-stop life of blacks and blues, propped-up
like some phony Hollywood facade.

It's a street where everybody wants to change or erase their eroded lives.

Personally, my threshold for pain seems to increase each day.
Why do I continue increasing the dosage?
What's next, murder?    

Each morning Dostoevsky stares back at me from the cracked mirror
on my rented wall— Know what that feels like?
Perhaps it’s a challenge that can't be met...
If ya know what I mean….

Horse hoofs beat down all the memories    
I can't seem to forget—    
Most often the space between thoughts is non-existent—
a non-stop brain hemorrhage, which means we easily pick at our scabs,        
but find we're embarrassed by our scars.

Our past is buried in a seedy landfill somewhere on the other side of tomorrow,
a vacant city without windows — where it's offset by a blue-grey sky,
and graced by Lucifer's band of fallen angles....
Time continues—
outlined in chipped Italian marble, and our espresso mornings spin into
mindless afternoons spent drinking shots in Jesus-haunted cafes, where
twirling ceiling fans whisper the blues, and all the waiters try to please:
— Mo ice fo’ yo’ drink, sur?

It's a lost war of mumbled words, endless images
and twisted symbols,
almost like looking for an empty life to fill.

Blue heat rises off the stoned sun, warming this aging planet
with questions of wonder, since it appears the future needs
more guidance than the past political jokes.

Today no one's laughing....
The Nu-South hustles down the rebuilt, new-age streets
on tenants’ terms, and wise tobacco growers dream of                
planting old fashion hemp, as they watch,
knee deep in spent tobacco juice, their crops turn to dust.    

All the Uncle Tom's have sold or bought the farm—
the rest, like everyone else, are thinking of running for Congress.
It's nouveau riches stamped PASSED DUE
too far into the next century to believe anymore.

We once imagined our lives as cartoons, now we live them.
It's a Walt Disney state-a-mind — life in the funny papers.
It's cutting-edge Super-Realism, and we eagerly offer
our children as clowns.

Timothy Resau has been published in the U.S., Canada, Portugal, and the U.K. Recently his work has been in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Sideways Poetry Magazine, Sylvia Magazine, The Beautiful Space, and an essay is forthcoming in Loch Raven Review, as well as poetry in Rat’s Ass Review, Native Skin, and Pure Slush. He’s just completed a novel called Three Gates East. His career has been in the international wine industry.