Post-Election Electrification

For Stacey Abrams

There’s a chain gang on the highway
I can hear them rebels yell
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell

Bob Dylan, “Blind Willie McTell”

Back in my wilder days of manic
Boppa-bop-a-bebop – PAR-DEE,
I’ll admit I got arrested a couple of times,

blinded by them PO-lice lights
swirling and stuttering blue
in the nightscape like a UFO landing.

I’ve survived slope driving in suburban Atlanta,
not looking both ways before crossing streets,
trafficking in whatever to make ends meet,

have tossed and turned a couple of nights in jail,
which amounted ultimately to next to nothing,
except for experience to cross reference and relate.

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I once told my late wife’s oncologist,
“Doc, I guess you’ve never spent a night in the clink.”

His blank stare a tacit no-he-hadn’t.

“But that’s what it’s like in the middle of the night,
when you’re waiting for the biopsy
to drop the next day.”

Experience to cross reference and relate.

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Nowadays the Boppa-bop-a-Bebop – PAR-DEE,
rarely sparks in my nervous system circuitry –
except it actually did yesterday –
when James Brown’s Georgia,
when Otis’s Redding’s Georgia,
when Little Richard’s Georgia,
when Ray Charles’s Georgia,
when Ma Rainey’s Georgia turned a very light shade of blue.

Blind Willie McTell himself
Had limped past the President.

So I stepped outside on the deck,
took in a deep breath,
opened my mouth,
and scat-bellowed at the top of my lungs into the wild blue yonder:

Geetchie geetchie yappa yappa – woo!