Sweet Home, Sweet Home; or, Robert Johnson Speaks From the Grave

This guitar is my crucifix.
A thirty-three year burden resting
between these hands. Jerusalem is a dirt road, salvation
the precipice of fingertip on bronze. For years
I done searched for Heaven in the blinding glare
of limelight. I prayed the Saturday night gospel
to bottle after bottle. For this is not the house of God.
These are the endless steps to the Tower of Babel.
This is not a grave I will crawl myself out of. They say
I sold my soul to play the way I do
but after all these years I still
ain’t sure who I done sold it to.


—Woody Dismukes