Dust Devils and Tornadoes

"I couldn't sleep last night,

you know the blues walking ‘round my bed,

Oh Lord, the blues walking 'round my bed

I went to eat my breakfast, the blues was in my bread"

- Good Morning Blues by Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter

Sweat drips in the gulf stream midnight.

Hot white light buzzes from naked bulbs like electric bees. Landing with an Edison eureka on walls dripping with fever.
Hips gyrate and grind their fleshy pestles against the air, pounding moist breath into dry powder.

Eyes clutched closed, on the tightrope line with pain and ecstasy,

inside the pulse and the grind.

Fluttering.

A butterfly wing clitoris.

The plywood stage creaks, shaking dust from its hair as iron nails strip out of slippery holes in a hardware burlesque revue.

Emceed by the foot: wrapped in a uniform of wingtips and snakeskin, it taps and stomps and slides, heals scraping through worn patches shaped like mid-western states on the moth eaten rug. Chipping beer soaked black paint from the timbers.

The click and the buzz,

low hum and drone of electric tubes.

Warm crackling fingers vibrating and massaging the sounds conjured from stick and wire.

His fingers: callused and hard. Ashen rocks given unnatural life. The hands of a golem, animated by black magic and set to a task.

A coin in the tip jar, a coin in his mouth.

The man is slave and master and slave again to these mythical, arcane fingers. As they Storm-Trooper stomp down the strings, bending and scraping and clawing the soul of the note out of purgatory and down to hell.

A bead of water pushed out of his scared, chocolate skin, crawls and rolls and tumbles. Somersaults and cartwheels down his forehead, to the tip of his nose. There it swings and sways; a trapeze artist teasing death, milking the oohs and ahhs, before falling.

Without a net.

Ending her career as a clean suicide circle on a dusty boot.

Golden whiskey bones.

Teeth soaked by the road.

Clenching with lockjaw force.

Grinding against each other as he pulls a high note from another dimension through the machine in his hands (all worn chrome pegs, turning sweat rusted gears). Conjuring a wail from a science fiction beast on a planet of broken glass.

Clutched close to his chest it is impossible to tell if he is controlling the machine or barely containing its rage and fury. The guardian of the audience, saving them from being consumed by the lion. Half ring leader, half Doctor Frankenstein. Keeping the creature at bay and keeping the women and men, with their marionette gyrations, on that needle point.

Just beyond the cracking whip and leveled chair,

that thin line of agony and indulgence,

redemption and lust.

Each sound is a deadly sin. When the note fades it is absolved and sent back into the world, into the ether. Back to the darkness to growl, chomp, bite and gnaw. To pace a rut in its cage until it can feast again on the ears, on the spine, on the goose bumped pores of skin.

A tiger, a bear, a wolf.

The pick is a tooth and a claw, prehistoric bone scratching at the bars of the cage.

Trapped. Howling.

The microphone, rusted by a thousand nights of howls, soaks up the cold sweat and warm spit. Spittle stalactites form on his chapped lips and are shaken loose. Chains rattle from the dungeons of his throat where a guttural tone is forced out at knife point.

A Groan.

A Moan.

A mammoth falling dead in the show, the last of its kind, screaming into the whiteness to be remembered beyond its bones. The death rattle of a dinosaur.

Syllables massage the sound as it hits the air to form words. The words grapple with the scream and hiss of the strings, with the dusty, hollow stomp on the stage boards as the wooden stool creaks in protest at the steam engine rumble of pounding and pumping legs. The words are simple, primal;

visions of loss and regret. Of pain and emptiness. The blues.

Clawing out of the bent plosives, the sway and the meat of darkness, there is something else.

An emancipation.

Cathartic ejaculations of fear and listlessness and sin. The bondage of being human of being alive. The chains around the ankles when you rise from bed in the morning. Life as it should or could be lived played out next door, or uptown or on the back pages of towns and houses.

The key to these chains is in the song,

in the moan,

in the blues.

The build, the pulse, the repetition.

Rhythms seeping with Voodoo and Incense, God and The Devil, throbbing in the room like ancient chants. The rapture hastened with all its demons and brimstone. Babies born and mothers dying; poverty and betrayal; hard traveling and evil women.

All of these speak with smoke filled voices through his words in a seance of sin.

Shoulder to shoulder the crowd rocks and slides against each other, slick with lather like broken horses. Strangers and lovers and brothers and sisters, moving with a primal rhythm, at once sensual and innocent, confident and exposed.

Coming together as small parts of the same orgasm.

One mind and body consumed with heat and driven with the whip of the beat and the clang and stomp and the howl.

Beer bottles rescued from drowning by the twos and threes out of buckets of melted ice, dripping with condensation, warming by degrees in frenzied hands.

Fists slap against the bar, creating tiny earthquakes. Spinning ashtrays like tops. Butts flying over bottle ring shapes of gray paste on wood.

The clash of the holler of his growl against the anguished screams of his guitar, lumbers across the room, dragging with it the moans and shouts and testimony of the audience.

Yeah!

Play that thing!

Let it moan!

Sweet Jesus, Let it moan!

Rattling the tin walls. Dust devils and tornadoes are kicked up on the earthen floor by sliding boots and heels, shuffling, stomping, sliding slow.

The song builds, rattling the winds. A clap, a shake, a vibration. Clashing again.

Clashing.

Clashing.

Finally he barks out the last word like a confession at the end of the world. A testament from a mountain top, fire melting the ice caps. When the sky has fallen, and the oceans have risen. He pushes that last word off the cliff with a stomp, his bottle neck slide sustaining an unresolved tone, leaving nothing playing in the room. Nothing but an echo. A ghost.

Eyes closed, his head falls back,

face to the ceiling,

smelling the silence.

The congregation continues to move and sway in the vacuum of sound, unsure how to stop. This tin shack, this one room juke-joint, remains somehow like the eye in the hurricane. For this moment they are all one in simultaneous tension and release. Floating in the silence.

Free for now.

Soon the spell will break and bottles will clink as voices invite the mundane back into the room, into the hearts and tongues and minds of the people.

But for these tiny seconds all of them are guilty and innocent, rich and poor.

Deep inside and floating above.

All of them are free.