EULOGY FOR GEORGE JONES by A.D. Winans

 

You moved from Honky Tonker
To elder statesman
In a career that lasted over fifty years
With over fifty albums to your credit
And number One hits that spanned five decades

Undisputed heavy weight champion
Of traditional country music
Linked to your idol
Hank Williams

Nick–named “No Show” Jones
For you reputation of not showing-up
At concerts with long battles
With alcohol and drugs

In 1955 you recorded
“Why baby why?”
And I was hooked
As i was with Hank Williams
And would be with Outlaw singers
Willie Nelson, Meryl Haggard,
Waylon Jennings and David Allen Coe

Like Williams you were a purist
Who would never be called a phony
Turning down the opportunity
To cut a  record  with James Taylor
And refusing to meet Neil Young back stage
Saying you did not know them

You sang songs that told the life
Of everyday working men and women
Saying in an interview
“My fans are real true country music people
I just sing the way it is
And put feeling in it if I can
And try to live the song.”

And that’s why I loved you because
I try to do the same with my poetry
Inspired as a teenager
By you and Hank Williams

You were  a Ladies man
Handsome as a movie star
Drank hard like your hero
Hank Williams
But outlived  him by 52 years

Tore men apart with your fists
In honky tonk bars
And women with your looks
The last true purist
An outlaw with an angel’s voice

Hank Williams waits
At the pearly gates
one block down
From Hill Billy Lane
Where female angels
In cowgirl skirts wait with
Flasks in their hands

You a legend to your fans
long before your signature song
“He stopped loving her today”
a song about a man who carries
his love for a woman to his grave
and today you carried your love
for pure country
To that same burial ground

4/26/13

A Deep & Gorgeous Thirst by Hosho McCreesh

Under normal or sober circumstances a blurb or a book review would follow on a new book not quite out yet or any book by that matter.  In this case after reading over 250 pages of McCreesh’s drunk poems this poem came out…

your buddy hands you
a book of poems
you switch from cheap wine
to guinness and back again
because you are a virgin
because the more you read
the more intoxicated you get
anticipation builds
like your first time
in the back seat
or the tequila whores in juarez
you turn the pages faster
kamikazes lined up
stretch down the bar
until you’re ready to pass out..

but you don’t pass out
you drink another  &
develop a deep
 and gorgeous thirst

____________

…granted not quite a review of his new work published by Artistically Declined Press   but I guess more of a tribute to the style, to  the talent and courage to break away from the artistic boundaries that identified a Hosho Mc Creesh poem in  the past.  There are no labels found here. It is an  unmarked brand.  It is new.  It is fresh as the born date on a bottle of Bud.  This book is breaking ranks.  Drink up.

I thought I was finished with this zine, I guess not–credit McCreesh.

Scot