When Crow isn’t busy
scheduling the TV lineup for Fall
or sneaking into the Oxycontin dreams
of angry talk-show Radio DJs
he likes to relax
and unwind
in the crumbling remains
of the Lawson Hotel.
He communes with jazz ghosts,
Sarah Vaughn, Bobby “the Sheik” Walker
or Maharaja Lynn Hope and points out
which of their passages
came from him.
The Maharaja asks
“Did I feel your presence
when we played our way
off the stage and into the alley
and then back inside
playing the whole time
wandering through the audience?”
Crow smiles
nods his head
leaves the bar
as Maharaja’s ghost
starts playing
St. James Infirmary.
Crow taunts the homeless guy
who tries to sleep in the sheltered
doorway of the rusting 3 story hotel
that was the down-the-block cousin
of the fabulous Lawson Palace.
Crow thinks of himself
as the new king.
Jumbo Lawson long gone and
so are the windows
so are the patrons
so is the Jazz row of 6th Street
now a stretch of
empty lot, grass, weeds, rats.
I am the new king
Crow proclaims
as the homeless guy
pulls his shopping cart in front of him
lifts his old broom
to defend himself
against Crow and
his army of windmills….
This poem is in tribute to Lawson’s Palace and the Lawson Hotel, important venues in the Harrisburg jazz circuit that included many clubs in an area between N. 6th, N. 7th, Forster and Hamilton streets, from the 1930s through the 1950s.
Rick Kearns is the poet laureate of Harrisburg, the first Latino-American to hold that honor.
