Livin' Out of a Suitcase

[good4somethingbum]

Livin’ Out of a Suitcase

Crescent City nights’re getting’ lonely
Since my crazy second partner’s gone
Just a misbegotten dreamer, poodle found his girlfriend’s femur
Diggin’ in a Motel 6’s lawn
Told the jury he’d been hearin’ voices
And a demon told him where to dig
That his eyes were burnin’ crimson, as if he’d been smokin’ jimson
And she’d perished squealin’ like a pig
Then he called my name out in the psyche ward
Like a lost, forsaken misanthrope
Was it sin or mental illness, midnight brought an eerie stillness
As he ripped his shirt and made a rope

Poisoned grits and poisoned lemonade
Strangled with guitar strings or a boot lace
Cos a restless death will emanate
From a drifter livin’ out of a suitcase

My first gig was at The Chuckle Factory
In that swampy Haitian neighborhood
Wind was howlin’ like a hellhound, some wild waitress held me spellbound
While she put some spirit in my wood
My first partner’s lady didn’t like me
Said she’d caught me lookin’ up her skirt
She could feel her heart exploding, full of haunted, dark foreboding
Ev’ry time I tried to wink and flirt
One night she said she’d reveal my secret
Stars were burnin’ like a hoodoo mass
And her fortune was demented, and her future was cemented
Buried in a Shreveport overpass

Poisoned grits and poisoned lemonade
Strangled with guitar strings or a boot lace
Cos a restless death will emanate
From a drifter livin’ out of a suitcase

Wicked voodoo dug in like a weevil in a cotton boll
Born from rattling chicken bones of evil in a rotten hole

And then someone pinned it on my partner
After show time up in Terre Haute
Cos she’d bought that scarf on clearance, right before her disappearance
Then detectives found it in his coat
And the night before he got the needle
He refused confession to a priest
Dying’s but a tiny kernel, from a harvest that’s eternal
For the table of a mystic feast
But then rumors said a bounty hunter
Found connections in my partner’s case
He was clever, shrewd and hostile, he was southern Pentecostal
So he knew of vipers, charms and grace

Poisoned grits and poisoned lemonade
Strangled with guitar strings or a boot lace
Cos a restless death will emanate
From a drifter livin’ out of a suitcase

Had a rented office near the Quarter
Spell books scattered near a whiskey jug
Sawed-off shotgun in his closet, but was that a dripping faucet
Or my whispered footsteps on his rug
Well, I’m strong for someone of my stature
And my steely blade relieved his dread
Then I took him to the bayou, where the gators won’t deny you
If the meat you feed them’s long been dead
Now that bounty hunter’s done with trav’lin’
And there’s no one left to track me down
Though a paper by his printer, said they’d found a wooden splinter
In the femur that that poodle found

Poisoned grits and poisoned lemonade
Strangled with guitar strings or a boot lace
Cos a restless death will emanate
From a drifter livin’ out of a suitcase

Wicked voodoo dug in like a weevil in a cotton boll
Born from rattling chicken bones of evil in a rotten hole

Now I’m lookin’ for a new ventriloquist
And I’ll sit there grinnin’ on his knee
And I thank that waitress that I exist
Even though my oak body will always be

Livin’ out of a suitcase
Livin’ out of a suitcase…

©2010 Robert George

[good4somethingbum]