A tribute to Paul DeLay and the Blues fest


Everyone loves a fat man, sitting on stage
with his leg out almost waiting for some
never-seen grandson to pop up up and ask
the faraway bluesman for a story, he blew those
tales through the harmonica's wail,
hot summer Portland days where the
daytrippers to the blues don't fall into
the prison cells and cocaine habits
squealed across riverside masses while Hood
sleeps off its winter blanket and
kids frolic in the Salmon Street fountains,
and there's blind hurt in the air, all
those dead years where a convict learns
every day-count gash in the cell walls,
every nasty trick we play on each other,
the dirtiest saved for last when
that dandy Devil didn't pick him up
hitchhiking home from Sheridan on the
long coast road, but collected that
soul full of bad debts suddenly in some
death-crazed hospital worse than a jail,
because you're all alone when
the nurse closes the curtain
and no one hears the blues over
the medical technology beeps and clicks
of life machines that can't support
a soul poisoned in America's grown-up
con of cops and crime and walked-out doors,
those lungs don't blow granddad stories
of betrayal and cheating and snitch friends
and women, they all kill you when you
give in and toss them the keys,
and one more time the kids splash in the fountains,
just a few years until they'll fall
in that dirty sewage-slicked river, too.