Listening to a little Vic Chesnutt tonight but I've been meaning to start this thing for whatever it's worth...
in no particular order...

Field Work in Ash & Blue

I left all my thoughts on Leavenworth Street
That lazy avenue always crying under the wet tarp:
For its anonymity, for the cracked-up eyes lingering
on its curbstones, which wonder where you've been lately
and who you're fucking at night while your children sleep;

that name synonymous with jails and private card games:
a legacy for the hustle, food stamps and warm dry gin,
But that was only where it began, the fat artery out of which
Blood then & now had been flowing: not blood for the nightly
news or the photos on the inner lining of the wraps, but
the scuffle just down the side streets, under dark awnings
and yards of cardboard glass, to be hidden from the neighbors
But known like the cheat in a spread: not a dime that drops
there is worth its keep, yet I dared nightly to dream
while my engine idled in the sad corners of its parking lots.

I held a fare uptown with a woman who danced for men
for twenty-five years, every night, I carried her twenty blocks
east and four south, and she spread her hair along the backseat,
as if somehow that would break the mystery of her shroud
as if men must live through such seductions to keep their namesake,
and survive the smoke as it curls from lips, and smile but look
the other way, no matter how lonely they've become
by the end of the day, no matter what the cost of the bear & bait,
as if anyone could fend off her silky advances & flip down the nightshade,
then slide away to sleep with clockstroke & cool antacid.

I seemed to be outlasting all the wretches, for no other reason
than to scratch together a few dimes, run back to the garage
to punch my card & rendevous to my nearest base of asylum,
without any kin to take me, the last remaining namesake this end
of the Missouri River, with the want of a nail for my kingdom lost,
just a witness in this field of spinning ash & blue, skinless around
the scalp & faceless like so many of these corners, long shots
to a ticket elsewhere, stunned in the midst of the anonymity
of every stranger and their crazed introductions, their demands,
their alibis, their aliases and wigs: beneath their cover, I am offered
these in confidence, should I contact someone who shouldn't hear the news.

In this vein, I took it all in stride, a nightly parade through this
cowering alley, old Leavenworth, ashen in winter, muddied by spring,
so that with summer, I left all my thoughts in the bus stations,
in the alleys, and at the girlie bars, in the fag dens, with the marquis'
with the spinsters, with this street and all its drinking buddies,
with its poker friends, its bartenders, its bookies, its shrinks,
with its Indian chiefs, all pass off and left in the notebooks, painted
lily white, all new and fresh on the clapboards, a new print for its sheets,
lying in a dress of satin, glimmer and found clean like so many other
passing streets, in other seasons, towns of intrigue, fools who wander
from the painful strain of hidden mistakes, streets washed over by ash & blue.

I really have to rework some of the images on this one, never one of my stronger pieces.
There's stuff I like about it but ahh, whatver. I can always improve of some of these pieces.
I don't hang out on Leavenworth Street in Omaha, NE very much anymore.
I don't have the time nor the wherewithal. I guess it's probably no worse than Broadway
in Council Bluffs, and a far cry from the Bowery in New York, or other places I've been in Baltimore or DC, but it's worth a nod. I'm always game for hearing about the places that never sleep, like the Strip in Vegas ir whathaveyou.