The Way It Is, and: When My Baby Rocks the Funk, and: The One Who Should Write My Elegy Is Dead
- The Way It Is, and: When My Baby Rocks the Funk, and: The One Who Should Write My Elegy Is Dead
The Way It Is
Tonight the hungry boys are out looking for all the hungry girls Delilah says & that’s just the way it is
Just the way it’s always been all those hungry girls all those hungry boys their naked ribs bright as vibraphones
Shined by the tracks of somebody’s sweat & as I look back at those nights claws bared & bloody
I wish I could remember just one thing that tasted even a little like tenderness & of all the things I wanted
I never once meant to fool you into thinking I was simply your ordinary guy who just took a wrong turn
Somewhere on those streets dissolving sweet as lightning along the pitch & ink of summer sky [End Page 324]
When My Baby Rocks the Funk
When my baby rocks the funk & the night shakes its silky booty I go upstairs
& dig deep into my attic trunks to drag out those zebra bell-bottoms & snakeskin platform boots
So I can properly call down the vibrating Mothership & when my baby rocks the funk shaking her celestial booty I will now confess
I just go all kinds of crazy in my junk & as Bootsy struts his starry bass lines all through P-Funk
My old life as a CBGB punk seems so completely defunct & I’m just happy I’m still the one who’s taking home the booty
Those nights my baby rocks the funk [End Page 325]
The One Who Should Write My Elegy Is Dead
The one who should write my elegy is dead
When we made that bet he said most likely I’d be the loser writing his elegy instead
Nothing is as beautiful as nothing he once said so hip just chain-smoking Camels or
Riding his shaky Triumph up Van Ness & the one who should write my elegy is dead
I guess I always knew I’d have to write my own elegy for him instead
Rimbaud on a tractor Anna says or Jagger pirouetting through the ranch’s drying shed
The one who should write my elegy is dead so I won’t rehearse again those
Hungers that we fed or expose both the cruelties & those we shared
I’ll simply try again to finish writing this last elegy instead of looking back & tonight
My daughter Vivienne’s off with friends & Anna’s reading of all things Winter Stars in bed
& the one who should write my elegy is dead & I’m the one the loser left here just as
He said I’d be left here writing his elegy instead [End Page 326]
David St. John is the author of ten collections of poetry, including Study for the World’s Body, a finalist for the National Book Award, and his most recent collection, The Auroras. He is also the coeditor of American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry. He teaches in the PhD Program in Creative Writing & Literature at the University of Southern California and lives in Venice Beach.
