Stormy Weather

Janis Joplin was singing “Summertime” the first time we kissed. Remember? That moment when our hands brushed across each others at the table, and we stopped – frozen in time –and the moment stretched thin, taut with tension and unanswered questions, and then our lips found each other.

But that’s another story for another time. It’s Janice that’s important now. She was the sound-track to our… what? Affair? Nothing so tawdry as that. A fling? For you perhaps, but for me it was deadly earnest. I loved you fiercely and wildly. And Janice’s voice soared and dipped and pulled the blues out of the sky through it all.

It was Janice that I heard in your voice that night when I came in to find you drunk and naked, draped only in my black lace shawl. Your breasts gleamed in the moonlight and your soft white skin shone through the lace. You were sitting in the window, glass of whiskey in hand, singing “Stormy Weather”.

Don’t know why, why, why, child, don’t know why…
There’s no sun, no sun, up in the sky. In the sky. In the sky.
Stormy, oooh, stormy weather.
Since my man and I, oh, my man, my man, and I,
aren’t together, aren’t together, together…
Seems it’s raining, raining, raining, child,
all of the time, of the time,
all…
of the…
time.

Pitch perfect blues improvisation.

You were never more beautiful than that night in the moonlight. My red-headed muse. My funny duchess The only woman to ever creep her way into my heart.

And all this time later, my heart still sings the blues.