|
A Review of Empty Frames, a poetry collection by D. B. Cox
Empty Frames by D.B. Cox
ISBN: 978-1-59948-037-4
Main Street Rag, 4416 Shea Lane,
Charlotte, NC 28227
The poems in Empty Frames, a collection by blues musician/writer D.B.Cox from South Carolina are dynamic rhythmical expressions
splashed across the pages in a riff or a subtle rant. The entire collection is a “repetition of a song”, a powerful one that explores
ordinary sorrows, disappointment, the emptiness and loss of the individual and the American dream. Many of the places and the characters
so graphically portrayed may be empty, worn out, lost and without hope, but the frames in this collection are not.
In the book’s first set, Lowdown, there is both meanings of the word; a circumstance that is mean and unfair, and a collection
of work that is true, factual and relative information. We are presented with images of place and character, portraits or vignettes
with their faded shadowy borders. We enter into a Charles Mingus “Weird Nightmare” in one of the dialectic traditions of blues
and jazz, that of suffering and loss. Similar to a Mingus composition, the lyrics of D.B. Cox make us stretch the instrument;
they rattle our cages, haunt us with their words. Nomads, panhandlers, hustlers, beats, magicians, hobos, bikers, street preachers,
the love-lost and lonely, drunks, cabbies, and street hookers move through a weird, shadowy landscape of bus depots, sad cafes,
Winnebago-clogged highways, rundown hotels, irrelevant billboards, tombstone parking meters, faded street lights, desolate avenues,
empty greyhounds, drunk tanks, last chance motels, day-rooms and the back alleys of the homeless.
In the opening poem “house of cards” we are introduced to the images that pervade the collection; the “whiskey-laced voice”,
the “homeless magician”, the “tired faces”, the “sad café sign”, “the shattered house of cards”. Here a congregation is ready
to be taken in one last time “before the last/bus leaves/the station.” There is a loss of magic where characters are just
“getting by”. In “getting by” subway travelers hang their heads, move in a “tangled dance” and are metaphorically “tossing
dead birds/into the air/trying to make them fly”. There is “white noise”, the assembly-line rolling out of the subway, the
subterranean world where there is blindness, faces that do not see or want to see the misery, pretending they have magic
while they are covering their eyes and merely getting by.
In “motor-head” a portrait of Harley-bikers struggling to find a little space, we find the American dream of the open spaces,
wind in your hair “easy rider” clogged by “caravans/of migrating/winnebagos”. This vignette is a Kerouac sketch full of the urgency
to escape, to be unconfined, to find a bit of the madness for the open road, “last- gasp america” but this quest is an illusion;
it is a landscape “opening/like an old newspaper”. The dream is crumbling. These are “motor-head misfits/with keys to the
highway/searching for/the last exit/to better days”.
Similarly in “hotel abracadabra” the magic is gone for the down-and-out, street preacher who questions the meaning of “the
whole/cross-dragging parade”. In “beat” a disillusioned beat-generation poet with a copy of William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch
in his pocket, and a brown-paper bag of cheap sweet wine reminisces on the “beat-inflicted bullshit/rust-covered voices
howling” while strolling to the bus depot to watch a 3 a.m. greyhound pull out for the coast empty. In “billboard savior”
hobos subsist under the smiling face of Dr. Phil. It is a sad ironic lament that the clear pixels of his media talk show
can’t or won’t help them. In “american business card” the card is ironically a wrinkled cardboard “out of work” sign
at the side of a down-and-out panhandler with hollow eyes squinting through the diesel fumes at the bus depot.
This not the card of wealth and property, but this is the card of a large portion of desperate America that
doesn’t even have the fare to make a break for it on “the pitchless hum/of an idling greyhound”.
In “friday night in the drunk tank” the lines
another friday night
in the city jail
for trying to make something
out of the emptiness
that crawls along
this boulevard
of half-remembered things”
conjure up a sense of loss reminiscent of the loss Paul Auster evokes in In the Country of Last Things. In Auster’s novel
“last things” refer to technological objects and the fading memories and the words to describe them. D.B. Cox laments a similar
loss. We have references to the abandoned cotton mills of the south, and along with them prosperity and employment, but we also
have a loss of memory. In “madly backwards” things are “slipping into the darkness/of rearview mirrors”, “old hopes fade”;
cabbies chase American dreams and find they are “red, white and blue illusions”. The skyscrapers are all around as the old
myths fade, but they too are crumbling.
In the Lowdown set despite the lamentations for this loss, there is an electric energy of cutting loose and being alive
amid the sorrow and the futility. D.B. Cox says “let’s go down/to the ‘cobra club’”, play the juke box, drink bourbon, play
8 ball, texas hold’em, “gamble with loaded dice”, “ride hell-bent/ on night’s pale horse”, “ruffle each other like/we’ve
done a hundred/times before”, be alive and let these moments last forever “and pray the sun/won’t come up tomorrow”.
Lastly in “waiting”, the final piece in the set, Donnie screams for an explanation – “anything/other than the empty/echo
of my own/voice”. For many the waiting room is a “corner room/windows closed/doors bolted” full of worn-out songs, lost dreams,
“rotting back alley trash” where the crossroad choices flip from dark to light to dark again. But Cox’s waiting room is
“note to note/line to space/phrase to phrase” where he performs, asks questions, shouts, screams, sings and waits for
answers. This is his “repetition of a song” eloquently played out like the notes from a saxophone.
In the second set of the collection, Passing For Blue we pick up this repetition but the delivery and the relative
facts have changed. Here we find portraits, tributes, elegies, laments, and nostalgic journeys infused with the energy
of jazz and the blues.
The opening poem “repetition of a song” says
“take me
to a place
where midnight
accumulates”
“where nighttime
lasts forever”
D.B. Cox alludes to Mingus and Monk, and the lyric “keeps on a rainin’” sung by Bessie Smith and Billy Holiday and says
there are three things he can depend on “red wine, old times, and the repetition of a song”. There is an element of nostalgia
here in a real street blues sense as he creates energetic portraits of various artists. In “bird on the wing” Donnie laments
a general replacement of jazz clubs with strip dives and references Dizzy Gillespie, the “king of bebop” and proceeds to narrate
a series of vignettes honoring many legends of jazz from Illinois Jacquet, the flying high tenor saxophonist who in his sleep is
still “burning fast/in the breakdown lane”, to Sonny Rollins, R.L. Burnside, Jaco, Johnny Cash, Art Pepper, Ray Charles, and Jerry
Lee Lewis. These narratives are pure music.
“sax-man’s loaded
drifting on a silver string.”
In “dressed up to rumble” Donnie pays tribute to the ‘great player’ personified who with his performance lays all
others to waste with his virtuosity. In “his heart knows the way” for R.L. Burnside, the electric/acoustic guitarist
who often threw in his unique extra beats at will into the 12 or 16 bar pattern, D.B. Cox composes an apt portrait
and you are held spell-bound by “an indigo solo/in free-time/unencumbered by meter/ an uncluttered country road”.
In “the healer” we get a portrait of a place of refuge where the energy of the horn player gets infused into “the
blue-grey smoke/of another five o’clock day”. Cox captures the contrast between the day’s weariness and the energy
of the music. The horn performer like an evangelist whips up the crowd, breathes life back into them. D.B. Cox with
his words breathes life back into all of us as well.
There is a similar sadness and nostalgia in the set. In “dust” we glimpse the down turn of a potential great musician who
becomes tricked by his choices of dope and gambling and ends up “caught between/cracks in the sidewalk”. In “endless river”
we get the familiar images; the irreverent fury/all used up”, the “crumbling house”, the “endless river” full of the highs
and lows, the joys and sorrows of our choices. D.B. Cox captures this fury and its loss in the lives of these musicians.
In “offering” for Art Pepper, the west coast alto sax jazzman with “fire raging/on the edge of a ragged soul/tired from
burning” the lines describe this raw flaming energy of creation that reminds us of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s line "the
mind in creation is like a fading coal". Who can argue with the poignant conclusion to the elegy for Ray Charles in “shades of ray”?
“i’m gonna paint
my windows black
as foster-grants
and go to bed forever.”
In the third set Ordinary Sorrows D.B. Cox returns to themes of deep distress caused by loss, disappointment and other sufferings.
Things are breaking down, lamentations are sung, temporary walls are erected, the storm is coming and it is a leveling force.
He hints back at something terribly wrong with the American dream and wishes to go back to the woods possibly like Thoreau,
to go back to a metaphoric “big easy” where life is slower, simpler and easy going. The house is rundown, the occupants
are trapped and searching for a loophole; towns are dying and their bus depots are defunct. In “rundown house” we see
the metaphor of declining America and particularly a declining south. Images of “cracked sidewalks”, “empty downtown streets”,
“vacant rain-streaked windows”, “gray skies”, “deserted cotton mills”, “forgotten working men”, “peeling paint” all show
the hard times and the decline symbolized by the crumbling house. The bus doesn’t stop here anymore to provide some semblance
of escape. In “bones” Cox laments for the decaying of worn-out things and in “burn” a portrait of violence and suicide that
shows much of what is wrong with America, Donnie wishes to devolve, to move “back in the woods/down by the river”, back
“to ooze and slime – before/the fateful lightning strike/ignited this crazy burn/down a dead-end road.”
The dead-end road in the form of the suicide of famous heroes is also explored in “no more mornings” and “krypo-night”.
In the former, Hemingway facing one morning after another, worn out from writing blows his head away, and in the latter,
George Reeves of early superman fame, “too fucked-up to fly” “pulls the trigger”. These two vignettes portray the actual
final ending of these larger than life individuals but they also symbolize a tragic loss of things which were once held
in high esteem; that free spirit of America’s creative force and the comic book hero figure able to “leap tall buildings
with a single bound”.
Empty Frames is a powerful performance, a rapid train ride, a jazz riff that slams us about our cages. The music of the words
is haunting, rhythmical, and totally absorbing. The notes take us on a “weird nightmare” and hold us nostalgically yearning for
“a slow ride
through an unfolding
summer paradise
always inching
toward the sun
back when time
was on our side.”
D.B. Cox
D.B. Cox is a blues musician/writer from South Carolina. He was born in Laurens and raised in Greenwood at Connie Maxwell Children's Home.
He graduated from high school in 1966, and joined the Marines in 1968. After being discharged in 1972, he spent several years playing guitar
in bars, juke joints, and honky tonks all over the South. In 1977, he moved to Boston, Massachusetts to attend the Berklee School of Music
where he discovered a thriving blues scene. After twenty-eight years of playing the music he loves with some great bands, he moved back to Laurens,
South Carolina where he writes and plays in a blues-rock band called "Nobody's Nothing". His poems and short stories have been published extensively
in the small press in the US and abroad.
Email
Return to Table of Contents
|