1. About the Dead Man and Road Songs
The dead man has been everywhere, man.
He walks along the shoulder, holding out his thumb.
From the Yucatan to the Yukon, and the left shoulder to the right,
the dead man has seen it all.
On Saturdays, the dead man goes honky tonkin’.
They write songs about him and call him
‘Stranger’ in Texas and ‘Buddy’ in Tennessee.
He hopes to pull the tire jack from the stone and become the king of the road.
When Jesus left Chicago, the dead man followed hoping to elude
the hellhound on his trail.
The dead man still carries the old guitar he found at a crossroads in Mississippi.
He tries to play like Robert Johnson but comes off sounding like Elvis.
He’s met them both out on the highways and told them he was following the Dead.
That was a joke, though, and he thinks they knew it.
In Luckenbach, he joined other dead men and they sang songs by Willie,
Waylon & the boys until dawn when the Sheriff arrived.
The dead man let love slip away somewhere near Salinas
and hoped to reach Amarillo by morning.
He got off the L.A. freeway without getting killed or caught.
He is on the road again, chalking up many a mile.
He’s walked through every road song worth singing, a long strange trip indeed.
Yes, the dead man has been everywhere, man.
2. More About the Dead Man and Road Songs
The dead man prays for all the roadkilled animals at least once a day.
He started doing this a long time ago, and it’s become his habit.
The dead man bums a smoke when he can, another habit.
He has seen (and sometimes set with a careless flick of the butt)
summer wildfires that scorch the median.
Coming around again in springtime, he’s seen the wildflowers
growing best where the roadside had burned.
This makes him feel important.
In the summertime he sleeps among the roadside prairie grasses,
and he huddles under bridges in winter.
Someday, the dead man will get where he’s going.
He hopes he’ll know it when he gets there.
But the dead man has been on the highway for years.
You have seen the dead man, and you kept on driving.
He doesn’t mind, though, loneliness and solitude are his beans and beer.
The dead man understands this is how songs are made, where they come from.
These are the dead man’s wandering years, and he is in no hurry.
—
This is a response to the Big Tent Poetry prompt to write a dead man poem using the form invented by Marvin Bell, which is based on the Zen admonition to “live as if you were already dead.” I started writing sentences and soon I realized that the dead man was a highway wanderer and that there were lots of songs about him.
Many of the lines in Part 1 either refer to or are borrowed directly from songs by Geoff Mack, Hank Williams, Roger Miller, ZZ Top, Robert Johnson, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, George Strait, Guy Clark, Willie Nelson, Jimmy Buffett, and the Grateful Dead.
Mad props to Dave Bonta for his post about formatting poetry in WordPress, which gave me the answer to indenting long lines, something I rarely use.
Go here to read more dead man poems.
James Brush is a teacher and writer who lives in Austin, TX. He tries to get outside as much as possible.
Nice work! And hey, nobody’s ever given me mad props before. Props, yes, but only the proper kind.
Thanks, Dave. Mad Props are the best kind.
Wow…this is quite good. Terrific, in fact. Try as I might, I couldn’t get any traction with this prompt. Probably because I have been thinking so literal of late. There are times it is hard to shift gears…
I was smiling reading the first half. I recognized many of your references. I was recalling some of the homeless we’ve helped while reading the second half. This is really good work, James.
(and I use Qumana (for Mac) to format my blog posts in WP. It has been very helpful)
Thanks, mark. I’m glad the poem worked for you. We just switched (back) to mac so I’ll have to look into Qumana.
A most enjoyable post, triggering all sorts of side trips in my brain.
Thinking “Eureka, At Last” I waded through the WordPress article but sadly I’m not a great deal the wiser for it. I don’t have the capacity to remember these kind of refinements, and the only time I ever tried that trick I ended up with incomprehensible gobbledegook! So all the more praise is due to you for having achieved what you set out to do.
ViV
Thanks, Vivienne. It wasn’t as tricky as I’d thought it would be, but it does make me like my customary short lines a lot 🙂
Reading this, I want to go on writing dead man poems! Thanks..
dead man and his shoe painting
Me too. It’s a pretty interesting form.
Reading this, I want to write more dead man’s poems! Thanks…
dead man and his shoe painting
James,
A fine dead man poem. You have made it look so easy.
(which I know is not true).
Pamela
Thanks, Pamela. That’s nice to hear that it came out that way. It wasn’t easy though it was fun.
You’ve given the dead man a new incarnation as a hobo bluesman with an empty C&W bottle and a dog-eared copy of Kerouac in his back pocket. Enjoyed it.
Thanks, hedgewitch. I didn’t even think to add a Kerouac reference, though I suppose it would have fit right in.
This is my idea of the perfect dead man – or even living man. A delightful read that produces a wee bit of travel lust.
Thanks, Tumblewords. It was a good one to write considering I had a very short road trip last weekend. It gave me a little something to look forward to.
Reading this I felt like I was hitchhiking, playing or listening to gigs along the way, taking in the midwest then heading toward the coast. You really draw the reader in.
Thanks, Victoria. Glad you heard it as well as saw it.
Aces!
Love the songs, of course. And beans and beer.
And I do understand wanting to sound like Robert Johnson (I come off like Brenda Lee, on a good day)
It reads aloud well.
Thanks, Barbara. I’m glad you dug the beans and beer bit. That’s one of my favorite parts of this and it’s a line that came about as quite a surprise to me, though it made perfect sense.
WOW! This was so entertaining, and as a fellow lover of the “road song” it made me remember many of my old favorites..thanks!
Yeah, Cynthia, those songs are great. I grew up listening to them.
what a great line: The dead man still carries the old guitar he found!
Thanks, Carolee.
Been looking forward to reading this, and was *not* disappointed!
I love the song lines in stanza one; they were both seamless and enriching. (“the old guitar he found at a crossroads in Mississippi” immediately brought in the picture of the picker who sold his soul to the devil in “Oh Brother Where Art Thou” — one of my favorite movies ever!) And *all* that music is “mine” so it read like a favorite dream. 🙂
The road kill section was brilliant, too. Great images, ideas. All.
Thanks, Deb. It was a great prompt so thank you for introducing us all to the dead man.
The music is stuff my parents always had on when I was growing up. Years later, I realized I love those songs too. Great stuff.
That picker from “Oh, Brother” was based on Robert Johnson who claimed to have sold his soul at a crossroads for the ability to play like he did. It’s one of the great American music legends. He had hellhounds on his trail for the rest of his short life. His guitar is the subject of Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues, a favorite of mine.
Thanks again, and glad you liked it.
I really enjoyed this, particularly the first poem. I loved the references (my dad was a huge c&w fan so it made me quite nostalgic).
Thanks, Tilly Bud. It was a lot of fun to remember all those great songs.
I loved the entire piece. First the music of the road, then the details of the journey itself. I grew up with the music and my father was a truck driver, so the journey was also memorable from the stories he told. It felt a lot like home to me.
I love what you did with the form and found that after playing with it a bit, it leads to some rather surprising, but wonderfully interesting places. I did a second one that adheres more to the form itself. You can find it here:
http://intuitivepaths.wordpress.com/
Thanks for visiting my site and I am so glad to have found yours. It was well worth the trip,
Elizabeth
Thanks, Elizabeth. Thanks for your comment. It’s really nice to hear that I got the feel of this right. I grew up with that music too and lots of travel, though no one in my family ever got to know the road like your dad must have.
I agree about the places this form can lead. I’m probably going to write a few more along these lines. There’s lots of room for discovery and veering off the path.
Thanks, again.
I very much enjoyed the mythic qualities and the sense of space and movement through it here – that which drew me first to Whitman and the Beats and then to the blues, mountain music and country. That relationship between the conscious poetic voice and the folk lyric is strongly evident here – a relationship that, whilst a staple of much American poetry, is, sadly, no longer a feature of British verse.
Thank you, Dick. The progression from Whitman to the Beats and then (back, for me) to country and folk music is sort of how things progressed for me as well.