The Jukebox Blues

 

It wasn’t what she said that made me snap, but the way she said it. All cocksure & positive. Like she actually thought she knew me. Who I was or what I was about. The way I carried myself…maybe. The way I drank…definitely. But she couldn’t begin to believe the reasoning.

                       The bar room was dark. There was some kind of indi-pop-decline that reminded me of static or nails across a chalkboard, booming out from the rot of the corner jukebox. The cones have been blown from the decades of volume. A good percentage of my coin went into that machinery over the years, but it has never spat out the type of soulless dribble it had come to defining that night. I’ve spent a great deal of time in that bar. And a great deal of time with that ol’ juke. There have been times when it screams the dead legacy of rebellion. There have been times when it forespeaks the anarchy of future. There have been times when it stands atop the bar & dances a tango of poetics, that, usually gets itself into heated arguments of defying age, head scratching economics, bulldozing theories of analytical metaphysics, and of course, I have been there, to hear it cry. To hear a jukebox cry a high lonesome yodel, can be very trying upon a man. To hear a jukebox cry is to hear the sorrow of all mankind in a desperate attempt to regain its sanity. It’s dignity. It’s heart, broken into fragments. Tiny shards that gets lost into the stratosphere, melting under the weight of the sun. The mourning of loss over a dignified trumpet or the howl of a poor old man, moaning blues in deep delta cotton with a lyric or a stanza phrased properly & tight. With more soul, more guts, more pain than I’ve ever felt before, but still relative to the drunken ears of a child. With Marlboro mouth & a litter of dead ammo piling high atop the bar or a garbage can, where you just one day might find these exact same words, drooled out of the scream of that very same child. The declaration of voicing salvation that gives a child hope,

                                        knowledge,

                                        prayer,

                                        emotion,

                                        life,

                                        worthiness,

                                        existence,

                                        soul,

                                        epiphany,

                                        feeling,

                                        tenderness,

                                        caricature

                                        bravado,

                                        caress,

                                        warmth,

                                        spirit,

                                        a bit of ego,

                                                & the acceptance of

                                        fear,

                                        heartache,

                                        rejection,

                                        loss,

                                        tears.

                      She extended her index finger, painted in a plush merlot, & poked me in the arm forcingly. Snickered an assuring grin & told me that I have never been in love in my entire life. Wouldn’t even know what it was if it crawled up my leg & bit me on the a*s.

                      I looked ahead to my reflection in the mirror, camouflaged by the bottles of assorted whiskies, vodkas, gins & cheap schnapps. Smile nonchalantly & exhale a cloud of nicotine into the air.

                     She’s a sweetheart of a gal. And I would never lash out at her in wrath.

 

                     I just chuckle with an apathetic agreement.