Author: cbcrenshaw

C.B. Crenshaw is a musician, artist, writer, coder, gardener, and maker in Alabama.

Poem: Cut-Up January 31

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“I’m with you! Here’s to Ourselves!”

Millions of eyes
Cover the ground
Your footsteps follow
You cannot recall where

The routes of the swallows
Who cut the air 
Their wings a 
wilderness of mystery

Thieves, illicit lovers
Grazing a pinnacle
Guttural howls
From cellars and lofts

Meet me there
Where at the lapis gate
Leaving the city
Riders sing soft

I simply want to be back home
a-eatin' flap-jacks, hash, and ham
With folks who savvy whom I am!

Poem: December 16, 2024

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Here is a thing to consider:
if all that exists is in
our own heads
then, when you
lie your head down
next to mine
and wrap me in your
universal outlook
I exist within you,
a data point
among the millions.

And when you
catch me lovestruck
from the corner
of your eye,
there you are
in my universe, too,
orbiting the blazing center.

Earthly Pleasures: Cordial Cherry Moment

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Driving across town to play music with your friends, you stop at the convenience store to buy a Cherry Coke and a Hershey’s bar with almonds. It is late autumn, blue and golden dark at 5:30 in the afternoon. The two guys behind the counter are arguing about whether this Honda or that Kawasaki is the best motorcycle, but all you can think about is the two-fisted glycemic punch you’re about to administer to your taste buds. The debit card purchase goes through and you scurry to the parking lot. It’s warm in the car and you crack open the cold soda. Your body registers the pleasant contrast between the warm interior of the car and the icy cold exterior of the bottle somewhere just below consciousness. My Bloody Valentine’s “Sometimes” plays on the car stereo as the sugary, cherry-flavored liquid washes down your throat. The bubbles taste something like the way the swirling guitar sounds. You immediately bite off a hunk of the chocolate bar and press the mass against the warm roof of your mouth, where it melds with the Cherry Coke still effervescing there into a cordial cherry experience that carries you back to the one or two times in childhood when you cracked open the regal red box your family received for Christmas and ate one of the strange treats. It felt like a rich, sensuous experience then, a refined luxury heightened by the scarcity of the cherries in the box, and that’s exactly how it feels right now. After a moment—you’re merging onto the highway now, on your way across town—the cordial cherry moment passes and a hard, round almond remains. Take a bite. Now repeat.

Maybe it’s just me.