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January 2, 2003 Ode To The Bisbee Woman, 120 years Strong{Written for Jay's Birthday Burlesque Show at The Earwig Factory, Jan. 02, 2003, but never performed due to the campy wild fun nature of the show and the consequent real- ization that the poem, being of totally different moood, might have proved a buzz kill.}
Old Bisbee Your eastern flank heaves a heavy sigh tonight Nodding, napping, drifting in and out Of a hundred year sleep You lay exquisite in repose from Carreto to Cross. Forget the man From whence your namesake comes Bisbee You are ALL woman. Row upon row they built and Made your bed and like Lilliputians Sent stairs like wires up your side Some to bind you Some seeking solace In your high and warm embrace. Copper plated Bisbee Conductor of big dreams Your digging schemes would have foundered generations ago Without the women who gave you soul The dancers, the flappers, the so-called Denizens of the deep gulch night Who, for a handful of rocks Would rock the lonesome miner's world For an hour or a night. Caged birds of the company store You whored when you had to To make a buck and Sang so sweetly in your crib closet bed over head While down on the floor Men with leather hands and Chimney black lungs Hollered hoarse for more, more, more. How many tears have you shed For the men who have left you or The mothers and fathers You lost to the east and To the beast which was the Mine? The Mine. The Mine. "Scenic View" Reads the asinine sign posted at the Pit That gross open grave Where once your pretty painted toes tapped time To a Cowboy Junkies tune Bisbee woman You were the junk the cowboys jonesed for The sweet syrup soul juice they gambled and died for.
Your soul juice flowed Splattered and Stung A sweet sting Intoxicating and Still men dug and dug Themselves to death and Even the man who found the copper first Lost everything to the Mine. You Bisbee Woman Are the ONLY true find This landmark town that extols the Mine Ever found. While the men were taking and raping and Scouring and scraping You Bisbee Woman had the heart to give back To the torn Bisbee earth Your buried placenta symbolic of All that was lost in the clamor for copper. Like some weird Passion play they branded your breast and Stuck a cross in your crown and Called you a town. You are a town. Today you are a town and then some A handsome recollection of a passionate past and Fertile future ground For the great painters and poets Tucked in your womb. For yes, still You are nothing if not woman. When change was needed that suited-men could not see and The whispered wisdom of a bosses' wife was key You were all woman. When gutless men took up arms To march away your striking husbands You were all woman. When in high times you danced and loved Without nugget or reason You were all woman. Caged bird sweetly singing. High class woman charitable to the downtrodden. Mighty Bisbee Woman breathing down Brewery Gulch. Breathing Heaving breasts full of all the life that's left In this tunneled ground RISE UP WOMAN! Rise up At long last! Shake off your painful past Your stinging candle dripping years and tears Shake! Shake off your bed of bricks and timber! Stand tall and stretch your forever-folded wings You, o beauty Bisbee Caged bird no more! Whore no more! When at last she stood She the mountain Reclining mountain women There arose such a thunder in the sky and Rumbling of the earth That the tiered walls of the Pit crumbled and Filled the hole and At last the gaping wound was healed. And as a gallery of ghosts looked on and All the townspeople, too Mighty Miss Ole Bisbee Long thought to be merely mountain Stretched wide her shiny copper wings and Flew off to join her copper heart In a place lost to time but Which she will easily find. In her wake The once-narrow gulch Became a canyon wide as the sky and A stream of red wine poured down the canyon Like the flow of blood from that place Where she tore free. -RSMcKinney, formerly the Duke of Bisbee
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