He’s a junky for the tune. He can’t kick it, the kick he gets,
like one Saturday— he was ten —and the Governor came to town
to see his father, drove all the way from the capital like he would
do once in a while ’cause they were friends, pals really,
the Governor and his dad, horny pals from the old days,
boyhood days, before they both sold their innocence.
That was the Saturday he and his daddy nearly killed the Governor
out in the Gulf in a furor and frenzy. Exhausted they,
wrung out after hours praying for sailfish but deliver’d
only of sharks, them babies at that.
He was still known as just that dreamy “Piano Kid”
with this visceral-ethereal—even, you might say, godly—way
with the Beckwith Empire his mother had installed for him
in the parlor of their boarding house,
a haven for odd-balls of every sort,
Pelican Bill the Fisher-a-men,
Mister Magic the Stupendous,
Rose the Rive Gauche Chanteuse,
and Gustavo the Engineer (father of the folding flypaper tent),
just to name the most notorious,
the ones with felony criminal records,
various scars, and obscene amputations—sinners
all—always in the kitchen fixing mustard and boloney sandwiches
while he was forever fingering his beloved A Minor Fugue, the
Chopin, as it continued to this very, very day.
.
studio arago 