How to Build a Juke Joint
This poem came out of a series of poems I wrote about juke joints, themselves inspired by the photography of Birney Imes of the same subject matter.
This poem was not, like many of the others, based on a specific picture. I wrote it when I decided to compile the series into the book that would become one of my favorites, Watering Hole: Juke Joint Poems (2007, Rewriting Ovid).

Start with something that
wasn’t never meant to be social:
a convenience store, a shotgun shack, a garage.
A garage is a fine start-up.

Wear it down.

Invite a friend over for a beer while you
workin’ on their car,
every beer another point shaved off
what you may ask for someday.
put a radio in the back, behind the
toolbox, to make the time pass just-so.
Stop pissing in the corners and
take it out back.
Invite that friend back over.
tell him, bring his friends,
with change to spare.

Move the oil rags from the orange crates.
Move the orange crates to make room for folding chairs.
Move the car guts and steel jacks.
Move the oil bucket to make room for a cooler.
Move in an electrical wire spool and make table of it.

Run 2x4s and cover them in
whatever boards come to you.
Sheet metal will suffice, but
not above the Mason-Dixon line.

Remove the old light bulb and run
Christmas lights out its socket
until the ceiling disappears in
shadow or summer yuletide.

Set your rituals.
Don’t bother with framing that first dollar;
you’ll be spending it.
Make everyone tip their hats to the
Martin Luther King picture instead.

Never hire anybody;
everyone earns they keep the
old-fashioned way: ale equity.
A bartender who stands at it
when he’s working and
sits at it when he’s not
is ideal.

Know your regulars.
Advertise liquor you don’t have to instill
hope.
Occasionally serve easy meats and
whispering pies.
Call drunkards by their traits and
only by their momma’s names when
they can’t come back no more.
Let the fast girls rub the slow men to sleep.
Let their pearls hit the dusty worn
cuffs of the farmer.
Let the deacon have the booth in the back.

Borrow the church piano and
never give it back.
Draw a line at the blues.
Let the nightclubs play music;
this a juke joint.
Give the band about three feet of space to work.
Make the guitar player sit in the audience
and the singer stand behind the bar.
They all want to anyway.
Call it Blue Monday even when it’s Thursday,
but never call a Friday anything but payday.

Paint your dirty fingernails in class:
throw down a rug under the card table
you reserve for special guests.
Nail up curtains where there ain’t no windows.
Have no dress code save the cutting eyes
of those who don’t appreciate
things too new in the
vicinity of their shrines.
Keep it respectable.
(Respectable meaning your sweatpants
can’t have no holes in them.)

Put in a fan even if it will not
divorce the wet shirts from
their masters.

If the roof leaks, leave it.
You need the holes and cracks to let
the Swamp Folk come and go
as they please.
If Mother Nature sees fit to knock a
good-sized hole in said roof that
bypasses quaint,
every table then becomes negotiable.

Set up a lost & found in case
someone needs a hairpin or
the band needs a harp in B-flat or you
need a spare .25 bullet.
Keep your pens in a cigar box
and your cigars in your pocket.

Never put in anything new.
View decoration as either a
personal vendetta or a communal effort.

Make it the pimp’s living room.
and the wino’s heaven.
Let the tramps stamp it with their spit and
their knife-carved memories,
right into the bar.

Above all, own it. Never share it.
Brand it with your fists.
Tongue its tiles and pool stick-poked panels.
Swim in its flooded stalls.
Sleep in its booths and to the jukebox’s
skipping 45s.

Keep makin’ a job of it,
every night.
Never make it home.
That’s everyone else’s job.
Your job is to keep the drinks cold and
handy, and to make sure that
when the bulldozers come,
you don’t have a tear left to shed.

Copyright 2007 - Scott Woods