Baby Blue, git to your room, mama gotta pluck her brows, sip her box wine, rock her some Jack in the sunshine. Okay in you go. Gate up. Snap. Click. No tears, little bonobo. Stresses mommy out.
Baby crawls, baby blubs, baby falls, baby walks, baby talks, spills, runs, grows, and mama say hey, cute baby, baby git out and play with your friends, don’t be hangin wich your old lady. Wheres I can see you. In by dusk.
And baby run home trippin on the big wax moon, friends passed out on porches under Jupiter lights and distant suns swirling around their heads, stars bursting cross black skies, big baby, big baby hast’a go home, take a nap with his mama, they laugh crazy as k’yotes.
Baby go from reedy muscles to busted knuckles. Sharp blades exploding outta his pockets. Tobacco wrappers, a bruh’s condoms, lacerations and stone fists, always out with the pack, setting fires to dry windblown grasses around the old barns, wolf howls and shattered glass, flying high on bottles of juke joint juice.
Baby, baby, come home and take care your mama. She gots the lonelies, misses her Baby Blue tall as the Carolina pines, quick as the north wind, ridin shotgun, guzzlin Wild Turkey, gettin lit with the boys of the night, stealin and breakin, poppn off rounds, holdin up the sticks, runnin from the sireens down by the iron rails where crawdaddy fingers hook round rusted tracks, and Baby Blue hide in the deep maw of blackness, peakin out at the theatre of swirlin red lights.
Baby in his blood-stained leather jacket, shark skin shirt, hip-slide jeans, now gots himself them inky make-up girls with big eyes and strawberry lips that don’t say yes, just say maybe.
Maybe baby. Maybe you can kiss me here and here and here, but only with the lights off and your mama under the gin clouds. Don’t touch me down there. I ain’t no simp.
Hips hard, bones shrapnel-sharp under baby’s sweaty pelvis, rocks in baby’s jeans breakin sassy thighs, so tight and smooth, no, stop, baby, stop.
I said stop.
Baby don’t stop.
Baby want what baby want. Take what baby do. Baby gits the juke joint girls who blow promises in his ears. Make him believe. Feel alive for the first time in Baby’s life.
And Mama beats her chest with her Bible, hollerin from the back porch, Not my Baby Blue, got it all wrong. He sunshine sparkles. Girls give baby trouble when baby only want what mama say he deserve. What mama give. What she got when she make Baby Blue.
