Ashes

Oh yeah, notes slip through slack guitar Strummed by long lean brown fingers Head bent down, hat askew, cigarette burning-- hanging on your lips Words play across the smoke through burning ash Soft hard words of love hot and love cold In joints where peeling paint never gets finished Where the river runs across itself every spring Your house on stilts waits for it to go home- Home where you can’t go, home you left a long time ago- Now you sing for tips in a local juke joint -- A place where night is welcome, A place where heat don’t go white hot- Down that turn in the road Inside those rusting gates Your last blues song patiently waits For that final ash to drop, For you to come home –-