Tonight's Poet Corner: Red Shoes, Blue Shoes, Red Face, Deep Blues
Red Shoes, Blue Shoes, Red Face, Deep Blues by Belinda Roddie The fool in the red shoes snarls at the lady in the blue shoes, "You're as crooked as the old willow tree in my front yard!" And the lady smiles and says to the fool, "Then your tree must be suffering from the low-quality fertilizer spewing from your enormous mouth!" And the saxophonist watching the screen outside trills a sad tune on a wobbly reed. His friend, curly-haired and green-eyed, joins his homage to the greats on a dented trumpet that still can howl to the moon as well as the wolves. Despite the alluring cacophony of their duet in the middle of a downtown deluge of early autumn apathy, all the jazz in the world can't save us from a reality of snake oil salesmen brandishing bottles stout as grenades in our faces, nor can it spare us from seeing, out of the corners of our eyes, the broken strings still holding up the shaky facade of stability on a dilapidated stage