Sunday, February 21, 2010

For Townes Van Zandt

when discovered Townes,we too were going out on the highway to

listen to them big trucks whine, hoping that our ramblings through

Canada in a borrowed sedan would show us what we meant to

each other. To the world.


when he married his first wife, she was 21 and not expecting

her new husband to spend their honeymoon locked in her shoe closet

writing what would become waiting around to die


when you called me, I was 21 and not expecting we’d ever speak again after

you took someone else on that same long drive to Toronto. But here

we are listening to him Live at the Old Quarter, Houston,

weaving through the hills of West Virginia


Pancho and Lefty singing our own Fraternity Blues

Somehow addicted to you the way he was addicted to

the airplane glue that sealed all his teeth together before

they cracked them apart with a ball-pin hammer


If I needed you

would you come to me

would you come to me and ease my pain?