Category Archives: Busted Heart

Children by the million sing for Alex Chilton

Little Big Star: for Alex Chilton (1950 – 2010)

“I never travel far without a little Big Star”
— Paul Westerberg of The Replacements in the song “Alex Chilton” on Pleased to Meet Me

All that mattered was the song, Alex,
the letters and the words
and those succulent poppy hooks.

We danced for you, Alex,
we learned diminished chords for you, Alex.
We bought your records.
We played them on our turntables

until the vinyl wore so thin
that light passed through the grooves

and it is that light that we miss, Alex,
but it shines on wax and gleams in bright
binary code like the light we drank from you –

our “Blue Moon” in darkness.
It will sustain us for now, Alex
until that next misfit unearths
a copy of “In the Street”
without a thing to do
except talk to you.

Aah.

Previously published by PresentMagazine.com.
© 2010, Shawn Pavey. All rights reserved.

If I Had a Greatest Hit, It Would Be This

At The Waffle House

“Behold, I show you a mystery;
we shall not all sleep
but we shall all be changed“— 1st Corinthians 15:51

Out of beer and out of time,
last call puts Tyler and I in a place
where mysterious blendings of caffeine and nicotine
work our Budweiser dulled brains awake,
where redneck jukeboxes full of whiskey voices
lament great losses of the true ones
and how we all get stomped
flatter than lonely Texas highways
complete with tumbleweeds and dust devils
simply by love.

So where are the rest of those Hank Williams poets
whose tears fall to the ground like rain
making puddles only bleary-eyed drunks
drinking their way through their blues can see?

When thy cup is empty, it shall be filled.
When she gets around to it and isn’t bellowing side orders
of bacon with those hash browns.

So go ye then on down to a place
where things somehow come to short order
in those small hours before dawn
through fogs of conversation
rambling through coffee steam
and cigarettes piling dead in testament
to a new faith healing
busted hearts in confirmation
that you will never be the same.

© 1997, 2008 Shawn Pavey