"improv"-ing on Catherine Bowman's "I Want to be Your Shoebox"

I Want to Be Your Shoebox

Memphis Minnie’s classic blues line “I want to be your chauffer” was miscopied in an early Folkways recording song transcription as “I want to be your shoebox.”

I want to be your shoebox
I want to be your Fort Knox
I want to be your equinox

I want to be your paradox
I want to be your pair of socks
I want to be your paradise

I want to be your pack of lies
I want to be your snake eyes
I want to be your Mac with fries

I want to be your moonlit estuary
I want to be your day missing in February
I want to be your floating dock dairy

I want to be your pocket handkerchief
I want to be your mischief
I want to be your slow pitch

I want to be your fable without a moral
Under a table of black elm I want to be your Indiana morel
Casserole. Your drum roll. Your trompe l'oeil

I want to be your biscuits
I want to be your business
I want to be your beeswax

I want to be your milk money
I want to be your Texas Apiary honey
I want to be your Texas. Honey

I want to be your cheap hotel
I want to be your lipstick by Chanel
I want to be your secret passage

All written in Braille. I want to be
All the words you can't spell
I want to be your International

House of Pancakes. I want to be your reel after reel
Of rough takes. I want to be your Ouija board
I want to be your slum-lord. Hell

I want to be your made-to-order smorgasbord
I want to be your autobahn
I want to be your Audubon

I want to be your Chinese bug radical
I want to be your brand new set of radials
I want to be your old-time radio

I want to be your pro and your con
I want to be your Sunday morning ritual
(Demons be gone!) Your constitutional

Your habitual—
I want to be your Tinkertoy
Man, I want to be your best boy

I want to be your chauffeur
I want to be your chauf-
feur, your shofar, I want to be your go for

Your go far, your offer, your counter-offer
your two-by-four
I want to be your out and in door

I want to be your song: daily, nocturnal—
I want to be your nightingale
I want to be your dog's tail


The Other Woman

I want to be the ceiling fan that rattles
above your bedroom while
your wife watches Cheaters in silence.

I want to be your baby
carrot, I want to be the car
that you drive out of Rob's Used Autos.

I'll be your new headlights,
the head lice sorting
your hair into unseen rows.

I want to be a show, a shot,
the pot for your stew, the gum
in gumbo. I want to be okra


buried beneath the fishsticks in
your freezer. I'll be a fall breeze, the bee's
knees all rouged with ragweed

pollen. I'll call in your
prescriptions, favors. I want to. I
want to. I want to be the last

grains of yellow rice, crumbs
of yellow cake that you
will mash in with potatoes,

hoping for a nuclear explosion
that will carry off this whole family
picnic in a mushroom cloud.

I'll be the truffles you dig
for, the music you dug twenty
years ago, your Thirty Years War,

I want to be your armoire,
the half-empty glass of water
on your one nightstand.