Here is a wonderfully poem...written by Eunice de Chazeau:
Ode to a Jukebox
On Saturday, the day of no demand,
Alex fondled in one hand
a second beer,
feeling a mere
hint of what evening might portend.
In nearby booths were one or two
like him, uncertain what they wished to do...
sipping, seeking, something new.
Opposite Alex, Tassie sat
slant-eyed as a sleepy cat
subliminally animate.
The juke box waiting a customer's prod
riffled its red,
riffled its red--
silent but gorgeous as a god.
Somewhere a coin clicked in.
Mechanically clutched, the platter
settled with plastic clatter.
The velvet wheel began to spin
the diamond point to mutter.
Love is a lonesome urge
and music its melancholy purge.
In tumid monotone they merge.
The listening ear by yearning bent
gives gender to the voice ambivalent,
baritone or alto swung supine
between the banal cadence and relentless rhyme.
Drop a coin! A dream is there
that they who crave
that they who crave
the iterate moan may sit and stare.
One couple scarcely dancing--spent
by the trumpet's breathlessness--
sways to the trombone's bloated discontent.
Alex and Tassie, seated yet, digress
from boredom they invent
to melodrama: syncopated stress.
Low-lashed their eyes accuse;
Wordless, their parting lips abuse.
They play at love rejected and rehearse the blues.
They take to drink, gulping their alcohol.
They coax their fall
as Eve and Adam did by clothing their desire
with numbness over erotic fire.
Drop a coin, ignite the flare
The neon night
the neon night,
the neon night will twist the glare.
Quivering like a switch-blade bared
the snare-drum threatens; the oboe paired
with the double bass ties knots in the beat,
stops the box's breath. Its bosom heat
turns blue and red to a purple strangle
with arteried green,
a varicose tangle,
a jungle that little by little ingests a spleen.
Alex leaps to his feet alert
like an animal in alarm
Tassie can feel from his fingers the hurt
as he holds her arm,
but the pain is only a mute on the thin
agitation of the violin.
A cymbal releases the knot, red flows
through the saxophone and the jukebox glows
like coal by a bellows invisibly fed.
Alex and Tassie pose,
then tread--
they come together, insinuate
a moment of mating, but brush-rattle fate
slurs and deters them. They separate.
Percussion pummeling monotone
stifles the tune,
stifles the tune,
stifles the tune and twangs the bone.
Alex and Tassie, soft of foot,
try the floor with half a shuffle and put
hands to shoulders, listening
while a havoc of brasses splits the string
of a cello. They leap, they poise and wring
themselves in the act of flight:
divine contortion torn from the trite
pant of color and groove-trapped sting:
Two leopards in a dappled light.
Then like an unprovoked assault
the coin-consuming rhythms halt.
Bodies freeze in a fierce gestalt
that melts into mediocrity,
blank-eyed as it was before
while the reek of stale intensity
and the dust of silence settle to the floor.
Alex and Tassie breathe and wait
the command of another brush-rattle fate
while the box, the unmoved mover,
sits multiple-hued and chromed,
smug as the beloved lover,
resplendent as the absolute, enthroned.
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