(In honor and love of Jimmy Buffet)

My grandmother would mail me 

a single stick of Juicy Fruit, 

wrapped in its dustcover and

a birthday card, until I was ten. 

Life like a tire swing, round and firm,

my arms wrapped tight, legs pumping,

toes stretched to touch the falling sun

the color of mangos above the 

honeysuckle vine, nearly a whole 

state up from Pascagoula, 

where a man once busted his flip flop 

and made a song about it —

though I preferred going barefoot

with my bathing suit and 

Juicy Fruit.

 

Then we moved

a whole state over,

to a life packed and stacked

with stale air and skies scraped 

by steel beams and glass, 

where I grew older and straight up —

a tall, prickly weed wrapped in 

concrete and trapped in the gilded 

pages of my Daddy’s holy bible,

the canon thundering, me perpetually 

blundering, the preacher men plundering 

all the lost souls.

 

While the Pascagoula man sang of  

lost shakers of salt,

They preached on lost pillars of salt 

in Gomorrah, the trickster Delilah,

the wickedness of Eve,

how there’s always a woman 

to blame, 

but the man from Pascagoula 

sang it’s his own damn fault.

And I believed him.

 

Breathed in, breathed out,

asked questions,

and found myself a rebel 

two states east of Eden,

stomped on and stained dark 

and wrapped up in the wages of sin. 

I licked my wounds and searched 

for the answers to questions that

bothered them so.

Through fifty-plus years

of perpetual caution

I’ve learned how to feel who I am, 

make profit of price, 

blend scarlet and spice,

till I filled my tin cup to the brim 

 

with red wine and roses,

with strength and fine daughters,

with full-bodied, complex 

self-love. I’ve now added sons 

and a broad-shouldered harbor

to the glorious song of myself.

Smoky and tart, I pour from the heart

the tunes I’ve collected in here.

Chapter and verse, blessings and curse,

some tragic, most magic, 

while the man from Pascagoula

passed on

 

his lyrics and lifestyle. The pied-piper of escapism lead me free of all shame, 

so today I celebrate juicy fruit,

the falling mango sun,  

the calcified shell of sin  

I sling out past the honeysuckle vine

and an old busted flip flop,

and rejoice that shells sink, hope floats

that life is like a tire swing, and

that true legends never die.