Crestline Poems | Examples

Bar Stool Bed Sore Ode To the Record Machine

Bar Stool Bed Sore Ode to the Record Machine

Smoking Winstons
At the Seaway Lounge
At 2:00 a.m.

The juke-box sighs out
Buck Stovell, Roy Crestline and an occasional Darla Parsell,
Whoever she is

Buxom barmaids who are 53 years old
Wear nineteen year-old gold stretch pants
Bleached blond earlobes
Wrinkled double chins
Kissing 
Genuine Cherokee Indian jewelry

An old gray side-burned man asleep
In the corner
Beside the cigarette machine
Middle aged women looking very divorced
At the bar, two stools away
From the pretzel can

I sip on warm Blue Ribbon
That looses it color in the dirty glass

“Oh … lonesome me”
Juke-box oozing out tunes
As my jaw oozes out of socket and 
Into my callus factory hands

Dirty finger-nailed 
Sex-starved wrists
Palms ready to …

Put another quarter in the box
Nashville’s monument to love
In a shaggy bar, in Lawrence, Indiana