DB Cox
DB Cox can be found in the early-morning hours, bent over a Fender Strat, in roadhouses and juke joints throughout the south. He describes his playing style as “ look at life through drunken, godless eyes” To quiet his tortured soul, he writes. He has published three books of poetry. His first chapbook is entitled “Passing For Blue”, and is available from Rank Stranger Press. Two other chapbooks, “Lowdown” and “Ordinary Sorrows”, are available from Pudding House Publications. His latest full size collection called “Empty Frames” can be picked up on-line at Main Street Rag Publishing.
nightwatch
in the gentleman’s
john—defunct exxon
hiding
out-of-luck eyes
hard as roman nails
bony back
to the wall
dead man
laughing
at nothing at all
shaky tones
falling
into a full-blown
smoker’s hack
bell-cracked
saxophone
rattling ‘round
the unholy sanctuary
top floor of hell
holding cell that smells
like a dress rehearsal
for the cemetery
waiting—
in this corner room
windows closed
doors bolted
a shit-city statistic
nodding
into the half-light
as a worn needle
scrapes over
smoky songs
blown by
the cracked lips
of long dead gods—
drunken stereophonic
dreams mingling
with the smells
of rotting back alley
trash—gnawed at
by fat rats
& starving dogs
too spent to howl
into the un-obligated
electric dusk
of men & volts
waiting—
to confess
the crimes
that have left me here
ready to admit
how at each
crossroads
i chose this way
toward this place—
from light
to dark
note to note
line to space
all taken apart
scrutinized
screamed into
waiting—
for something
to come back
an answer
an explanation
anything
other than the empty
echo of my own
voice
dying away
against the walls
of this tomb
this
waiting
room