I want to live on a beautiful island Where it's warm all the time And on this island I want it to snow Three months a year And I want those three months to be November, December, and March And when it snows I need it to be seventy seven degrees And I want the snow to stick Here I imagine Jack Johnson, Jason Mraz, and Zach Gil will sit around playing music They'll play from noon to around ten That's when Kwali the local pool boy ends his shift keeping the oil out of the ocean Kwali he plays the Ukulele and sings about beaches no one's ever been to until around midnight When the perpetually burning bon fire dies down and the island falls asleep As for the rest of the music here on the island Every morning there's this old steel guitarist He's from just south of New Orleans A place called Under Pressure Really it's just the hull of the broken fishing boat he was born on But he calls it home all the same And a kid who used to play trombone for the high school jazz band But he picked up the harmonica after he found out chicks don't dig trombones And the two of them sort of play old dixie With a steel drummer who never seems to find his shirt in the morning But you never really mind that And on Sunday mornings this really old woman Ssays her mom was Harriet Tubman Which we all know is a lie But she's got scars from head to toe so you might as well believe something Man she wails For two straight hours She wails Wails to God, to the heavens, to Jesus, Georgia and the first row of church And when she wails her tears are a lost language from the tower of babble and we all understand it And on Wednesday Wednesdays We waltz We waltz to really old records That we play on the only turntable on the island That Mr. Lee drags all the way from his house to the community center with no walls And the whole island shows up in summer dresses and Matthew Mcconaughey shirts Even the one we call grandma And her husband who everyone calls Uncle for some reason Come dressed to dance And we all leave our slippers at the door this place doesn't have And the sand warms our feet while we waltz Sometimes it's the Tennessee Waltz And sometimes it's the Viennese Waltz But most of the time it's just the waltz we all learned in eighth grade Either way Every Wednesday there is a beautiful girl She's five five, maybe, five eight I don't know I've been lying on my drivers' license since I was sixteen so I don't know how tall people really are She's got south pacific features But with my track record by the time I actually make it to my island she'll probably be a red head We waltz We waltz until the records skip And our legs turn to Jello and all we can do is collapse in each other's arms While the ocean tickles our toes Our finger tips tickle each other's palms And we let that guy in the moon do the rest So when you see me set sail If you can catch me you can climb on board And if you can't Then Wave goodbye
A collection of poems by me is available on Amazon Where She Left Me - Michael DeVoe http://goo.gl/5x3Tae