“Shadow Kingdom”
By Mike Schneider
At the Bon-Bon Club
in old Marseilles,
the band is crammed on two forklift
pallets—two guitars, plug-in
acoustic & here-come-old-flat-top
electric & a ten-buttoned melodeon in
& out breathing carnivalesque squeals
each player masked, covid-style, black,
hooked at the ears. Shadowed
in cocktail-table candlelight,
a blonde woman holds tempo
with two-fingered plunks on steel
strings stretched up & down the neck
of a grizzly-bear sized standup bass.
Upfront, a cornstalk of skinny old man
growls bare-faced into the grill
of a microphone, the kind that stares
at you blankly like a robot from 1930s
Berlin. It hears him, but with no
clue or care whether he’s espousing love,
contempt, indifference or all of the above.
He seems harmless, the old guy, not
an Elvis-like smasher of decorum, but
vaguely dangerous, flashing occasionally
a wolfish sneer, as if to dust the words
with flecks of rust from his tired heart.
Something signals a past-his-prime matador
waving & trying to provoke with his cape
a bull named Puzzle of Existence. He’s
a wizard of song, the old guy, songs so old
no one wrote them. They just walked in
from somewhere & might soon head out
to some other nowhere-in-particular. With
his mouth-harp, he blasts windy swirls
of sound that echo down the coast to Rome,
an ancient pile of rubble. Just then one
of the ladies lays her cheek on the shoulder
of a dark-skinned sailor she pulled from his
chair, slow dragging her heels through a layer
of sand & who-knows-what on the floor. No
dogs are barking in the neighborhood. If anyone
screams, no one hears it as any kind of warning.
