A Hard Rain Poetry Series inspired by Bob Dylan from PW Covington

Bio: PW Covington writes in the troubadour tradition of the North American highway.
      Taking inspiration from the creative and expressive nexus of songwriting and poetry, Covington has been invited to present his work from the Havana International Poetry Festival in Cuba, to the Beat Museum in San Francisco. In 2019, his collection North Beach and Other Stories was named a Finalist in LGBTQ Fiction by the International Book awards.
      PW lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he has worked on film and television productions such as Better Call Saul and The Cleaning Lady.

Mad Swirl 
(Out on the Highway)

The road is learning how to live
All that road-going

The Blues is learning how to die

Trip taking
Booty shakin’
Forsaken and forgotten
All those melodrama mornings
Total evil rallied against
The purest and most righteous
We can conjure 
Fiction
Lyrics
Poetry
Religion

Careening locomotives
Mustachioed villains
Attractive young women
With long and dark hair
Tied to railroad tracks

This is Jack’s mad swirl
This is Dylan’s Southern highway

Catastrophes called problematic
Solutions hidden, enigmatic
Snap, crackle, pop
And static

The Blues is learning how to die
61 times, already, today
At 33 speed, I read

Sit down
Tune up
Sigh and enjoy the ride

Come back again
Come see me
Queen Jane

The Longest Road

Them Blues folks say
It started up Saint Louis
Roosevelt Sykes, keeping time
Moaning downriver
Nineteen 32

Batts and Kelly
Come way before Ginsberg and Corso
To Memphis
Come back through Tupelo
Mississippi Fred and Honeyboy

It’ll take you up to 66, they say
Maybe out to California
Some say NYC, they don’t know
Longest road I known
All this time

Some talk of crazy poets
And women in hop house midnights
Masks on stage and 
Drinking tequila cocktails down in Florida
The longest road I’ve known
That I know, jumpin’ like Gatemouth
That, I know

Anything past Saint Louis is a myth
All that California dreaming, 
Cold Dakota gleaming in the morning
On October bleeding railroad tracks in Denver

Imagined, in the journals of white-boy
College drop-outs, heirs, and auto thieves
Out to test and stretch the Blues
To see how far they go

The highway towns along the way, abused
Washed away in Jim Crow Hurricanes
Remembered more as Minnesota than Memphis
The satori rush of nothing
Being where you remember it
Revisited, not reclaimed

Hobo camps and juke joints
Paved over, sealed in wax
Read about in air-conditioned rooms
Served up, COVID-safe
On plastic

Dancing electric and laughing
Burning, those nights that the devil came ‘round
Benzedrine and molly 
Mixed and mingled, time machines and guitar strings
Zen ray-ban sunglass paperbacks
And Billboard

And it starts so far 
Down in heartache
Longest road I know
That I know
That, I know

Forgotten

Blood on the Tracks
And Big Sur
The writer in retreat, ego-wasted
Mid-life exam
Turning your head and coughing

Washing away the once wondrous road
Knowing the road took you nowhere
It was only you out there moving
Down to the water

Back to desolation in New Brunswick
Then to France
Chasing so many childhood carnival
Memories undeniable

The sound demands an answer
Shaking hands in the foyer
Back and forth, from Dean to Sal
“Hi. I hear that you’re the new me.”

Bury me in an unmarked grave
To be forgotten
Like Kaufman