Deconstruction of the Blues

Deconstruction of the Blues

70 DECONSTRUCTION OF THE BLUES It’s big like a forest dancing It sounds like the blues butts and hips butts and bellies clothed in soul garment for the heart and sex A banner across backstage says IT’S TOMMY’S BIRTHDAY And Tommy’s down center working it in that funky groove like a lover that’s come and come again The blues is so big A light is switching on inside me I’m watching two tall slender women dancing a dark and a blond and I’m thinking How far the blues has come Mostly white people Tommy is white his two side men and a black drummer Watching these women desiring them both of them the blond perfect and sad or so she seems to me expressionless Hollywood moves the dark more complex more funky isolating from the hips like an insect writhing in its pupal sack 71 The music cooks down in sheets We’ve come to play dancing in the forest to other men’s dead men’s music electrified burned up to date And suddenly the blond is dancing with someone else a short stringy-haired older man I spin to cut in on the dark but a smallish well-dressed white man is dancing two feet in front of her She pumps her inward dance and he pumps his I dance with other women and some of them are there for me but I don’t desire them I’m watching the two and they do it again and again the blond dancing with a tall thin black man narrow-eyed hushed like a hunter the dark in front of that same smallish man who appears as if beamed up an architect he reads on my screen somehow thirty-fivish prematurely white-haired Their quicksilver maneuver the dark so deep as if she doesn’t know or doesn’t care Are they lesbians? I don’t think so 72 That light is on bright inside flooding my brain the forest on fire Tommy the president of flames I see their stories spinning out and I almost know which one is true assignations burnout distant or part-time loves I’m burning for them lusting for both of them to fuck them their bodies and to penetrate that curving silvery cocoon But at the same time I feel close to them right next to their private need tight their private hunger to come dance in the forest friendly with an open heart the blues is so big ...