Sunday 14 July 2013

Rickie Lee Jones

She drawls a slow song to the band’s easy
rhythms, a drive-by cruising down the riff’s
long melody. Red beret, Garbo-gloves up to elbows,
she introduces these boys here with a purr and they
play to her coy eulogies as if hopeful lovers.
It is a deliberate seduction, crafted like the patois that
crawls from nicotine air – a cigarillo drawn through
loose yellow-gold strands of hair – with lyrics of
licked lips after a night trip to downtown bars
becoming songs in dark alleys behind juke-box joints.
She sings the finer points of folk taking dreamy
rides through hot city streets in stolen cars,
the routes to where they’re heading mapped out in
Rickie Lee’s neon-flashed urban Americanese.

1 comment:

  1. So atmospheric-I can hear, smell and taste this poem.

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