Once In A Blue Moon

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

Once in a Blue Moon
She turns around your whirlwind frown
and sits beside your lonesome guile,
whistling down the wind.
She blew down houses to get to you-
to get you to notice her.
She dressed her hair to grace your smile.
She buttoned you up to undress your fear (with warmth)
You climbed her kisses beyond burnt bridges,
and crumbling walls.
Your world was ruined, but you escaped into her embrace.
And time forgot to forget you for alltime.
Once in a Blue Moon
She reminds you to remember.

Care Free

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

Napoleon at age 8 or 9

There you were. Before they got to you with big words like Love and Sex, with games of seduction and rules of attraction. Not content to contend with the charade of maturity, you learnt to wear a mask too tight and simultaneously loose around the questions that grew too wide for your infinite imagination. Careful to not be careless without a care in the world that’s not care free. There you were, and so was I.

Bathe Away

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Bathe away. Babe in arms. Let it go. Down that stream of consciousness. Tired eyes swim through it. Bathe away in the filthy water made of sweat and fear and frustrated sex, discontinued when we touch it where it hurts. Bathe away, bubbles blown apart, the morning starts before you sleep with naked hope that you wake up in the wet of dreams. There you are, turning, stirring the pot, making it rain, running that river down the rocky path. No way baby, out of this. We lay it all down in that holy place. That water takes us in the middle of our struggle. That dirty water, fucking us into submission. Liar. Take us with you. Take us down, all the way baby. Spread it wide. There, there. There she is. There you are. And inside of you, find my love in the multitude that race to erase you from memory.

Mr Marshall

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They say you’ve died. They say we won’t see you humming your tune and waking the smile out of frowns behind counters anymore. Yeah those ladies loved your sunny disposition, long behind a counterfeited expiration date, or maybe you just couldn’t wait to escape the pain that was eating you alive. But I don’t know if its true. I still see your face in the presence of my mind. I still hear your accented voice. The cheer in it. The life thriving in the tone of its warm Island sound, that rises to catch the transient express of fleeting daylight joy. And I have yet to shed a tear. It would not cost much more than a moment, but I’m saving it for your absence in the days to come, when they say that you are alive, in the memory of those that remember you as you were. Not as you could have been. A man. A friend. A father for better or worse. A giver. An optimist with a melody in hand. To me, a symbol and a stranger, but oddly enough, more familiar than the faces that I have made a closer examination of. And if you are dead, the misery of the agony that came to know you so well, will be the first to abandon your Temple for another sucker of the breast milk of life. Not for the love of company. Like hate it feeds on dark necessity. Pain does not like to sleep alone, but its a selfish lover, that commits to keep you a prisoner without pleasure. And where the pain excites the life it throttles to submission, we can only hope that your heart did not surrender without a struggle before you exhaled your love. Your last breath in exaltation. Your first words in…..

I Can’t Find Your Name

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

Paved in stone. Engraved. Embalmed. Footsteps trespass. Distress wont get it tonight. Blame the vain in you and your two headed horror of an attitude, lives beside lonely in the multiverse with mistress mirror tacked on. 

Tacky tactics with tactile execution, she blew me a kiss before I watched her die inside her laughter. A barbed wire mystery dressed to tease, concealed her pain with red lipstick, cuckold the prick of needles let loose on the needy old cock that crowed when she played her finest trick (you fell for it too).

Two whores in a harlot system governed by well dressed fear barely making it past the Pavilion cafe on stilts, throw curve balls when gun play is headed their way. And only one sees it. Swinging hard on her wave length he reaches out a hand to gently persuade tears out of her eyes. And she wonders who’s zooming who. 
Trespassing footsteps embalmed with the ointment of sorrows, loaned for a lifetime or a lunch hour, unforgiven by the debtor of dubious deeds who engraves tombstones of the soon to be forgotten and your name, not your handle on the matter at hand when light bends the truth. And love might yet find it.

Goodnight Blondy

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

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Corridor of lights, felt something on me, moves the handle, to attention. Squeeze me hard then leave me at ease, alone with my freedom thoughts. Uncontested heart ache like a tooth, we do the biting in here, but you’ve never been bitten by a thing called love.
Swift as a vanishing whisper wisened by sorrow, and the masterful teacher of mistakes, we trigger war heads when we lean against eachother, to repel cold comfort with a touch.
Skin so soft it hurts like friction, the motion of minds that think as one but betray a trust, in waves of passion. Can we escape this fatal meeting of assembled words we speak with eyes which conspire against us?
Rhetorically ravished by questions that haunt the loser with the dabbler’s hand, till he dies against the grain. You don’t spit when the swallow aint so heavy and conjested like there’s traffic in there, and you might even enjoy the ride. Tied and tested, tried then rested. Not enough, Tied and tried and we come to mean nothing in the aftermath when dead or arrested.
So deep, the blade is so clean, slices straight through our…………………
Promises broken

Musique de l’utérus de mon âme

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And while we’re on the subject of life and the virtues within this mortal coil, living through all senses, and awake to the wonders our eyes breathe in to exhale the fumes of melancholy and her lover’s kiss on the hand that held you back from the possibility of escaping death, a persistent aroma that lingers around you and confides with the fears you try to hide in your past’s pocket, it took less than a moment to find your hope transfixed, with your doubts swept away by the sheltering wind that clothed you when your love was naked. You hear it too.

November 2nd

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“And In the half light, see me as I am” – Jeff Buckley, Opened Once

November 2nd came close to her door. Too close. Stood in front of it for a heartbeat and watched the years fade away. There was no welcome parade in the sky above. The stars hadn’t arrived yet to light my way back to insignificance. Just the black on black of an Autumn night. I was back there again. Inside on the outside. She was inside me again. Behind the fortified wall built by muscular fears lay remnants of our transient lives lost in the fire where we danced the Kamikaze Waltz with our dreams and nightmares bound as one. Memories.

Tell me I got it all wrong. I won’t deny it. Naivety shrouds the slow development of cynicism, but I was guilty from the womb, cause it was those same infantile tears I cried when you closed that last chapter of our story. I was your open book but somehow the plot and character development got too heavy to make sense of. Stunted growth or premature maturity, I couldn’t tell. I mean love was all I knew back then. That silly love that some men and women try to hide from, lest it be taken for weakness or granted. I couldn’t hold it in. When that water rises up from the deep, it takes down all in its path like a rapture with contempt. It must have been scary for you to have to contend with that brazen, cavalier young man, though you loved me too even when it manifested in the most self destructive way. Pushing me to despise you was an exercise in vain. I couldn’t turn away.

I think I understand it now. You had to escape my love. You would never have survived it. To be loved the way I loved you would have cost you your identity and anonymity, because as Baldwin said, “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” So you chose to remain a mystery, and kept me on the leash of your shadow. My best friend and a stranger. I embraced the mystery and all that volatile beauty that came in the package of your body, mind and soul. That’s what you were to me. Beautiful. And I was right there for all that pain that kept you a prisoner of your secrets, though I couldn’t heal you with words or kisses. Like you, I was a wounded creature on insecurity highway. With the blood flowing I still found cold comfort in your touch. With your lips you ushered me into your labyrinth world and left me with hand me down hopes of a future together. The same hands that gripped my back would cast me back to the poverty of your absence from my life on that Rocket ship that Stevie sang of. And when you offered me your precious temple without regard for its value, you might remember that I made it clear that I couldn’t afford your “spoilt goods”. You were more valuable to me than any ambition I could conjure up in the folly and virility of my youth. You were all those nights of dreaming, and praying, and longing which turned into years. We were lovers before we ever were. You knew that too. We were the half of each other. We were the unspoken words in a glance across tables of chattering friends and escalators on opposite sides. We were the solace in a momentary embrace which felt like a lifetime. And when we held each other, when we rolled in that roller coaster of emotional chaos, that took on various forms of passive and reactive aggression all the way round, I saw you hiding in there. I saw you naked in the dark. Did you know that? I saw you as you were in true likeness and I knew that I would always love you.

For Victoria (Wherever you are)

Has It Come To This?

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

“History without myth is surely a wasteland; but myths
are compelling only when they are at odds with
history. When they replace the need to make history,
they are a dead end, and merely smug.”

                            – Greil Marcus

What did you see?

Ghostly guitar, keeping determined, uncertain time
with the drum, like a scorned staccato lover,
preceeded by a mournful horn crying for yesterday and
tomorrow, crying for real, crying, crying for
something real, trying not to die, twinkling,
twinkling our little star, piano tip-toe as soft as
snow, delicate as life, jazzy organ stirs to rise our
love, twirls her hair, reminds us of moments and
kisses, memories and music lingers and why we only die
twice at most, but then love outlives us all, even in
our worst dressed season, before the slang turns to
something new or loses interest with you, and what
does it profit a man to gain the whole world and you
know the rest, and the sound of spirit and soul
struggling to exist, to articulate, to comprehend with
a sure hand, and naked expression can be messy, and
misunderstood, like emotions can behave in ways we
have yet to learn, like change we have yet to embrace,
with strange faces, freaky fingers, frank and fearless
but dare not touch the sacred things, wash your hands,
right or left, it seems too hard to go deep without a
guide, and do instructions always make right if the
root is wrong, and pains the brain beyond the
realisation that it has come to this…or has it? Was
he dreaming? Or was it a reality of dreamy
imprecision, sensually welcomed into the epic fantasy
art of living a love that never existed in the
material world, but who would deny him the twisted
pleasure of romantic pain; the brutal beauty of a
floating mirage, like a cloud hovering just above his
head (a grey halo), walking wounded awakens dormant
desire from the shackles of dangerously repressed
passion, fool-hardy though he may be, but hardly a
fool on a hill he never climbed, and guilt is a
mountain we have all climbed, but the glory of love is
the peak turned upside down, inside out and all the
way round.

See what you did?

A Refrain

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

Tomorrow will not be a work in progress before a refrain,
(before) the rain settles, and snow falls,
and they raise a hand to strike my cheek or wipe my
brow. I hold the pearl in my eye (the other hand), and
plant the seed of graceful song, and rub the soil
between soft palms (when we see eye to I), before
lost trains of thought, we wore our best years at a
distant glance, and thought we’d meet on Andalusian
hills, to dine with dreams we didn’t make, to share
stories we haven’t lived, and paint pictures we could
scarcely imagine.

Tomorrow will not be an excuse for today’s unfinished
business, talkin’ bout how good it feels to get another
chance at life’s poker table, to play your five
stringed instrument, like a child making three special
wishes by a fountain, with your lungs pumped full of
hot air, and the mercy of the wind at the back of your
neck, to dabble again, and maybe with a little lady
luck, razzle, dazzle a fortune born of sweat beads and
high blood pressure, and fly you away on a ready made
bed of thornless roses, with a song in mind for when
you cross over, hoping that the hill won’t roll over,
when tomorrow strikes you and your waterfall
resolutions, slippery, just as quickly, money like
water trickles through fingers, pressed together,
pockets shut tighter than fists, breath held longer
than destiny’s late shifts, but you don’t feel much
younger than first love, now dare you ask older,
wiser, brother, sister, friend in disguise, what the
wind behind your back is saying, when she ain’t
blowing you away. The voice I hear says, “What you
don’t do today will not deliver you tomorrow”, as
surely as one day bears no resemblance with another.
Tomorrow will be decided today.