Ballad from the Soundhole of an Unstrung GuitarThe best I ever wrote was in an attic.No chair. Manual typewriter on an upended box.No screen on the lone window, which I removed.Bats flew through.I woke up one night and Blue was in bed with me.Nah, I said, and he put on his wire-rimmed glasses and left.Somehow, I ended up with two kittens. Littermates.I wonder how they lived and died, where they went.The only furniture was the mattress on the floor.A wooden box full of someone’s Mardi Gras beads.No ethics. No lock on the door.No worries about vermin, rabies, fleas.Where did I pee in the middle of the night?There must have been a bathroom down those narrow stairs.A shower somewhere.A gold shower curtain laced with mold.Blue once told me I walked in on him peeing and laughed.That it ruined his life.Well, Jesus, I’m sorry.I would never have apologized back then.I knew no forms.Just a swarm of bees in the rafters who agreed to leave me be.I made a line break when I took a drag on my Salem Light.Menthols were pure as poetry.Where are the words now, that you wrote in that hellhole?On the typewriter ribbon I stuck in a knothole. Romantic PoetYou would not have loved him,my friend the scholardecried. He brushed his teeth,if at all, with salt. He lied,and rarely washedhis hair. Wiped his asswith leaves or with his hand.The top of his head would have barelyreached your tits. His pitsreeked, as did his deathbed.But the nightingale, I said.