A not friends poem

A fellow met at the above Old Crow Medicine Show show in Morgantown, WV on November 14. Not his real name -- it sounds a lot better than this one I made up.

Yankee bones lament

Bill Wildwood up from Pittsylvania county, with a beaten down tri-corner hat.
With metal all down his legs, woven through his bones, and up his shoulders,
For reasons he won’t say in particular, just the weather aches
Him something awful in the Virginia damp.
He hands me whiskey in a flash of silver flask, brown paper hidden,
Some knee-jerk self says reject a stranger’s booze, In West Virginia,
Waiting for hot fiddles and high, lonesome sounds,
But this ancient, boot-stomping love brought us from our separate ways to here…
So I take three good sips, pass it back,
Now he and I, not friends, but easy enough,
Talk the gallant suicide of Pickett’s charge, the perks of a pocket of weed,
The illegality of West Virginia, and how some in some Appalachian
Corners tucked away, they speak the queen’s English still.

And this New Years Eve in Nashville’s gonna be damn near historic!
I should really come on down, everybody’s going to be there,
And I wish to God I was somebody else who knew just how to run
Away to a stranger’s floor in Tennessee, unafraid to ring in the new life,
Dancing all night until the metal in my leg sings sharp and stiff.
I’d drop my gs in a minute, drawl slow and easy,
Not because I tried, but because it would get in my marrow that quick --
Living on big, wide, wooden porches, covered in creeping vines,
Banjos, banjitars, howls of poverty and odes to contentment,
Having the kind of patient soul to make food and flowers --
Things that grow -- out of well-loved, death-defended dirt.