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    38 Bar Blues
    38 Bar Blues
    38 Bar Blues
    Ebook102 pages36 minutes

    38 Bar Blues

    By C.R. Avery

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    About this ebook

    C.R. Avery's audaciously charismatic second book, 38 Bar Blues, is a tome of poetry loaded with bar stool musicality and brass knuckle poetry. Welcome to a clear glimpse into a motel 50 miles outside of town, a window into the life of a modern troubadour and the courage of a young father trying to keep the highway of diamonds shining while singing the song of innocence. C.R. Avery's writing flows like a Tennessee Williams stage play, from haiku-size poems to longer erotic tales that sink the reader deeper into backstage smoke of Avery’s worlds. 38 Bar Blues is like a Bob Dylan setlist; a play constructed like a Charlie Chaplain silent film; a book built to make the reader laugh and cry. It all comes out as true music. 38 Bar Blues is the perfectly crafted journal of a living legend. Enter the back-room of an old Italian cafe, where dirty dirty politics, outlaw love, and outrageous beauty are all in the cards.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWrite Bloody Publishing
    Release dateAug 13, 2010
    ISBN9781935904090
    38 Bar Blues

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    • 5/5
      C.R. Avery has a way with words that makes me jealous. I love reading his poetry and wish I could read more. A great Canadian Artist that is worth discovering!!!

    Book preview

    38 Bar Blues - C.R. Avery

    GRAVEYARD

    Les Deux Saints de Montreal

    Her black bra is on the dresser,

    wool hand-me-down coat on my back.

    St. Lawrence prays for a confessor,

    St. Catherine begs to differ and leads the attack.

    The army of migrant workers are ready.

    No devil in Montreal!

    The snow was fast and steady,

    each motel watched it fall.

    Sheltered down in the basement of her computer house,

    under surveillance of a high-end store,

    edge of Chinatown, quiet as a church mouse,

    I pray for St. Lawrence, St. Catherine, and migrants of the war.

    A Few Thousand Words

    The sun has gone to sleep in a heap of summer dresses.

    The Mexican moon has not risen from her foldout bed

    for the 9 below zero night shift.

    Please lift the lights in the apartment windows of our village.

    They are our only lonely guide

    through the charcoal cold of her bitchy mysteries.

    They will shine and illuminate unshaven black thighs

    up to her royal blue undergarments,

    waiting for handsome altar boys who are really young dykes

    with switch blades concealed under their cloaks

    to light the orphan stars.

    Smoke by your train soaked window.

    My art history class was drawing female nudes

    that would have given Picasso a hard-on

    and make Big Momma Horton’s cootchie wet.

    While bathing in semi-expensive red wine,

    we all took turns as model and observer.

    One stripped slowly with red cheeks,

    the other returned from the washroom wearing nothing but a bowler hat.

    Both beautiful like a Coney Island Ferris wheel,

    adorable like foxes in the chicken coop.

    Have you ever seen a hobo naked?

    He looks like a millionaire.

    From the 4th floor balcony,

    a disfigured cat growls in a car-width wide alleyway below,

    by the light blue smells like teen spirit dumpster,

    a dirty rose in its yellow teeth and soon in its hungry belly,

    while the big-breasted moon climbs the stairs to her post.

    She casually smiles in the modern world darkness,

    taking the universe by storm.

    Now the women are clothed and silent in separate rooms

    while the man pounds on a typewriter on the fire escape

    like Father Time.

    Sadly, the sketching class is no longer oil based and naked

    in a 3 penny pencil drawing opera

    of see-through apron excitement.

    But look out your train soaked window.

    You can read about a period in art history

    that undressed by lamp light,

    right here in our tiny village.

    Man Sitting Beside Me

    at a Campfire

    I asked him if he was a musician;

    he said, No,

    but added, I write some poetry, though.

    Later in the evening

    I asked when he started writing.

    He replied, When my wife left me,

    then looked into the fire as it crackled and warmed us in the rain

    and added,

    "It was also around the same time

    I started hanging out with criminals."

    Arctic Wind

    My woman has a tattoo on her back

    no one sees.

    It only appears when my hand glides down from the bottom of her neck

    to the imprint on her skin of a tightly-worn belt.

    It’s fine-line detailed, giant monarch butterfly wings.

    As we make love, they flap like a helicopter propeller,

    fanning our bodies like arctic wind,

    or an open ice box.

    As we lie in bed after kissing the inside of earlobes

    with alarm clock’s radio,

    moonshine bottle dry,

    smoking satisfied,

    I watch the ink run

    all Halloween orange

    and black licorice blue,

    dripping down to her sweet ass

    which of course I squeeze,

    her wings now hidden from the world.

    BIRD CAGE

    She had an old barrelhouse upright,

    what piano tuners call a bird cage.

    They’re too

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