| SUPPLY & DEMAND for billie holiday you left metropolitan hospital in my fourteenth year ten blocks from those city projects dangling on the lip of the east river & the sadness we saw from a distance was your constant thing disguised in lenient poppies. had i known you were so close you might have borrowed the filters we wore the fine mesh screens laid lightly on callow eyes because sadness is demanding. it hangs on walls in east village apartments ingesting music from voices mirrored in the air. sad songs are necessary they supply melodious demands on sophisticated ladies crushed between white gardenias & exonerated bibles chivalrous demands on discourteous death for failing to return a lady to her seat silent demands in frigid vestibules recurrent genuflections of someone in need & because you sang the end of a love affair in tones that escaped your throat like the ghost of original sin going home after an eternity of all night jam sessions then walked away only half a mile from my ignorance i hung the song sheet beneath the mirror. are you trying to tell me something? my woman asked. no i replied i just like sad songs. Stewart Brisby (from A Death In America © 1986)
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