Empty Frames
by D.B. Cox
Main Street Rag Publishing (www.mainstreetrag.com)
2006, 115 pages


               the cold, dead look
               in the eye
               of a street preacher
               who knows
               the long shot
               has gone wrong

                       - from “Hotel Abracadabra”

D.B. Cox steals his creative fire from an Olympus staffed by Robert Johnson, Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix and all the significant minstrels and session players in between (Jaco Pastorius, Billy Holliday, Thelonius Monk et. Al.)

Empty Frames refers not so much to these figures’ worldly successes as mortals, but they (and their dialectical followers) inevitable demise at the hands of the American Night.

               hustling & rustling
               every crosstown bus
               that drops tired faces
               to congregate

               like cartoon minstrels
               with cinemascope eyes
               ready to be taken in
               one more time

               before the last
               bus leaves
               the station
               & the flim-flam man

               disappears
               like the burned-out
               letter on the sad cafe sign
               just up the street

               where he sleeps
               in the back booth
               & dreams
               about the shattered

               house of cards
               he once called home

                       - from “House of Cards”

The worn out husks of blues men and women and jazzmen and women (in addition to the standard issue bit players as junkies, dealers, pimps and hookers) themselves move through a litany of empty frames: dead end motels, flophouses, roadhouses, work cubicles, mass transit vehicles and even a billboard sign flashing the superficial condescension of Dr. Phil.

Cox himself is a Southern blues man and knows all too well the conversation between the blues and jazz reflects the cyclical give and take between death and rebirth.  The themes here may seem overly familiar to the so-called underground of Bukowski acolytes, but as only a true bluesman can, Cox delivers the heavy riff with precision and electricity.

-Paul Corman-Roberts