Joy Leftow
I Sing The Blues For You Today
I want to do poetry like Billy Holiday singing the blues
I want to do poetry like Ella Fitzgerald
I want to be me singing my holiday blues
Billie’s songs are poetry so fine it makes me think I’m her doing rhyme
Thoughts about Billie make me go off line, hook line & sinker, she puts me back in time
I sing to my lover, I want to make your poetry mine because you spout rhymes
while observing my life become an unending grocery list of things to get done
Your life or mine, yours is on my mind – the list of to dos keeps growing exponentially
Number 1, try out a mattress, I just got too many things to do. 2, buy it, 3, buy new locks to keep someone out number 4, find someone to install it, make 10 million calls & keep writing lists. What did you say? How many sessions, any lessons in storage? Will the Divine power of intervention help.
I don’t want to bore you with the details and derail you from my song.
Damn, wonder if I’ll ever see Willa Dean again– oh man, you know the women I mean
Kept her head wrapped up like an African Queen with her creamy coffee looking self?
Willa said the secret to good potato salad is to go heavy on the mayo
Willa Dean days, they’re all in a haze now. I was so high back then.
The memory lingers, listening & watching while she told stories. She’d whisper, her voice barely a breeze, tell me about her lovers, say, “I’m gonna get me some.” Sometimes I’d get confused & asked did she mean her husband or lover. Willa’d have dinner waiting when her husband got tired of cab driving & came home to rest. She’d show me wilted lettuce and bring it back to life telling me about her lovers, drugs, & children while making potato salad. I thought she’s a woman of many talents, a stoned cold junkie and a working mom combined
The nose that knows, her preference was coke, good moist coke at a good right price too on the upper – upper west side in Washington Heights, 162nd street to be exact
Willa was friends with a famous New York jazzman and his wife, a New York City teacher. Willa had class & style combined; she took me to dress models at the Ritz one time. Got paid for it too. It was such a pleasure to do. I even got a pair of designer gloves out of it.
People accepted Willa everywhere we went –
We were at jazzman’s apartment, small tight crowded living room upper west side 90’s.
Willa’s friend sat across from me staring at my big breasts. I can see how tight your muscles are.
Let me massage you she said aggressively hurting me so bad physically we had an argument instead.
Passing through hundreds of lives so many colors
Let me take you back to what we share – strivings for love – wanting to go somewhere – wanting to discover who we really are – got anywhere to go? – uncover ~ see ourselves through the eyes of others and – finally see who we really are.
extend this power to the umpteenth degree. We still wonder who they think we are ~
uncover recover to turn to return to who we want to be
Dreams are reality – stop thinking, dreams are the color of my true love’s hair
Beyond the color of my true love’s hair, his dreads caress my bare hands
A whole-years grocery list pressed into a foggy mist of autumn red
turns bright chartreuse before bleakly the list dissolves before my eyes
True colors make my heart sneeze amidst a perpetual mist of violet-blues
a dream more real than a memory
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For more Joy Leftow, please check out her blog:
http://joyleftowsblog.blogspot.com/
Her web pages:
http://violetwrites.googlepages.com/dubblex&joyleftow
http://writer.joyleftow.com/
http://joyleftow.googlepages.com/
And visit her on MySpace:
http://www.myspace.com/joyleftow
Joy Leftow’s work is also featured in these books available from Amazon:
