Wartime And Everyday Blues. A Poem by Phillip Christopher Henry

 
Scourin’ the racks
at the D-A-V
for some thing
that says Blues
that sings
other times
vivid in
bottleneck steel string
guitar caterwaulin’
Mississipp,
found an ancient,
long-to-the-shins
olive drab double-breasted
heavy-as-1942
United States Army issue
stiff sandpaper collar,
tall-on-the-neck-of-a-GI-my-size
coat.
 
Slip my arms down sleeves
a dozen years older
than the flesh and bone going in,
gaze at the reflection
looking back from inside
a tall looking glass,
and wonder why
the perfect fit
feels so wrong,
why the same bold coat of
Hollywood World at War
flickering light movie star
hero posturing
monochrome pompadour
looks paltry beneath
haphazard chaos
of thin gray hair,
midriff bulging and
cheeks stretching
almost into jowls.
 
Pull on the collar and
sixty-two year old wool
meets fifty year old face and
scrub of dry sagebrush goatee,
mirror reflecting incongruity,
and ponder how this
thing of wartime
and heroes
just won’t fit
my everyday blues.
 
“Wartime and Everyday Blues” appeared in Lullwater Review, Vol XV, No 2 (2005)
 
https://www.facebook.com/philliphenrychristopher/
 

 
Poet, novelist and singer/songwriter Phillip Henry Christopher spent his early years in France, Germany and Greece. His nomadic family then took him to Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio and Vermont before settling in the steel mill town of Coatesville, Pennsylvania, where he grew up in the smokestack shadows of blue collar America.Escaping high school, he made Philadelphia his home, alternating between Philly and cities across America, living for a time in Buffalo, New Orleans, Fort Worth, even remote Fairfield, Iowa, before settling in Indianapolis. While wandering America he has placed poems and stories in publications across the country and in Europe and Asia, including such noteworthy journals as The Caribbean Writer, Gargoyle, Lullwater Review, Hazmat Review, Blue Collar Review, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Blind Man’s Rainbow and New York Quarterly
 
 
 
 
Robin Ouzman Hislop is Editor of Poetry Life and Times at Artvilla.com ; his publications include
 
All the Babble of the Souk , Cartoon Molecules, Next Arrivals and Moon Selected Audio Textual Poems, collected poems, as well as translation of Guadalupe Grande´s La llave de niebla, as Key of Mist and the recently published Tesserae , a translation of Carmen Crespo´s Teselas.
 
You may visit Aquillrelle.com/Author Robin Ouzman Hislop about author. See Robin performing his work Performance (University of Leeds)