Everyday Misery Bus
Tell Billy Strayhorn* to
take the everyday misery bus
straight to my hive:
We'll get lunch
I'll show him the network
and his cubicle.
Like a plant that walks
and lusts,
Billy will open the room with
accusation, genius and
the lather of a wake. At our desks
we chat some, then more than we can pretend...
more our timeless theme and less their racket.
And the paycheck still comes.
In the end they'll say:
together we infected
failed words and
leaked our remedy
through paint covered speaker grills.
Together we said:
Tap your foot
on the everyday misery bus.
* "He was not, as
he was often referred
to by many, my alter ego," Ellington
wrote several years after Strayhorn's
death (following a long
illness, exacerbated
by drinking and smoking)
at the age of 52.
"He was my right arm,
my left arm,
all the eyes in the back of my head,
my brainwaves in his head
and his in mine."
