27 Club

I'm making this up as I go,
but does anyone else but me
care that Jimi Hendrix
once lived for a while next-door
to the Handel House in London?

I'd like to be able to claim
he lived there when he died;
he was quoted saying it had
been his only real home.

But BBC had banned him
over the Cream business.
Overwork, exhaustion, hash
maybe Monika Dannemann

took him to the Cumberland
hotel (though he died
at Dannemann's Samarkand
apartment).

Legend links him up
with Robert Johnson
Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin
Amy Winehouse, others who

lived fast, died young, left
their beautiful corpses up
and down some mythic highway
stretching from Threadgill's

to the Albert Hall. Did they all
die of causes attributed; or
was it just there wasn't enough life
for them out on the road

drop-kicked through night slappin'
windshields from Baton Rouge to Saigon
to crashed and burning airplanes
and boozy hot lights

where the music died night after night
playing like crazy, singing every
song those drivers knew, performing
their miracles at the door to Lazarus' tomb.

Bored, we protest we're still surprised
their miracles weren't permanent.