Stone Cold Dead (in the Market): Fleecie's Bop, and: Changing Up on a Blues Guitar

43 Jonathan C. Smith Stone Cold Dead (in the Market): Fleecie's Bop Fleecie cut me, quick cut me, beat me one, two, three o'clock in the early morning. Beware, brothers, don't make your wife the other woman. Don't leave her in the undertaker's upstairs bed or arms. Better dull that paring knife she save for shaving bunions & corns, for singing: . . .and ifI kill him, he had it coming. . . (And) if she kill me, can I say I loved her? Can I say love at all and not say careless? Can I, looking at moonset & sunrise, say: not since 1945, not since turning east to the Zanzibar's glow, have we turned this salt to sugar? Can I say love, oh love, oh lying love done changed keys & locks and I can't get it in my head that love done put somebody else name on my songs? And if who kill who, who had it coming? Agood man, a good plan, oughta see flat-foot greed come hobbling. . . .and ifit kill me, I had it coming. . . When I first met you, Fleecie, we must've been sweet sixteen, but cut quick one time, two times is the last. Said a man gotta choose, take the next chance to headline (healed) at Elks Rendezvous or Apolle be a freeman sailing again. Shaken. Stitched. Scarred. Sheared, but, baby, a man, not some short-leash dog. Pick up on it while I'm putting it down: the one time friend for money will leave you. . . .and ifshe kill me, we had it coming. . . Changing Up on a Blues Guitar The earth is not earth but a stone, Not the mother that held men as theyfell Wallace Stevens I've hated him long enough as to be unable to breathe without him. 44 the minnesota review But not as though without him. With out him but like an inextricable, an unthinkable kiss. And not at all like a kiss, but a stone. A stone. Who, now, is he? Some earthy, some earthen expert in the defining act, blithely ranting around texture and density? Some doubter who, having never believed a James Brownian croon, could scoff, would scoff at some thing so simply compelling as a pretty, as a plain face. As cheap fruit, blind lemons on a plate. Who has, even less, idea or inclination to disembitter lovers who, having spent lives on their feet, save grudges for ice water and ottomans. Lovers who earth, stone, wood, or water, sit and breathe. Yes, who is he whose dozening bereaves men and lovers, bereaves not only of mothers and earth and hands. But honey, altars, sugar cubes. Leaves them, lovers, bereft of all but the insufficiencies of extremes. What sadness, then, to realize, all you've done is to make yourself over again. Better, then, cool one, to have been a potter—knowing the vagaries of water, mud, heat, clay. Better to have been a shearsman, of sorts, breathing air now dense enough to buoy a falling man. Come, Big Joe Turner, wail. ...