it’s cold in chicago.
bleak. no freedom
in the frozen streets

75 cents & a chewed-up
copy of “naked lunch”
in his over-coat pocket

taking a break
over a warm metal grate
listening to subterranean trains

rumbling back & forth
on static steel tracks to nowhere --
blue eyes cracking like ice

no dreaming
on the sidewalks tonight
a satori-seeking poet

dragging history around town
in a brown-paper bag
blood-colored tokay

blunts memories
that won’t go away
visions of benzedrine-fueled

ghosts spitting out winding lines of
beat-inflected bullshit
with rust-covered voices

howling about chaos in the cosmos --
the last desolation angel
takes a drink & thinks

about a stroll to the depot --
sit & raise a toast to the 3 a.m. greyhound
leaving empty for the coast



D. B. Cox is a blues musician/poet, originally from South Carolina. After graduating from high school in 1966, he did a four year stint with the U.S. Marines, then moved to Boston to attend the Berklee School of Music, where he eventually found the blues circuit. He loves writing for the same reason he loves playing the guitar—a way to communicate how he feels at a given time, on a given day. He now resides in Watertown, Massachusetts. His writing has been published online in Zygote, In My Coffee, Remark, Underground Voices, Dubliner Quarterly and others, and in print in Aesthetica, Snow Monkey, My Favorite Bullet and Open Wide Magazine.
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