Soda City Salute

Today’s writing prompt was an involved one that asked for a poem in the New York School of poetry, explained in a link here. I took one liberty with the instructions and made the piece about my own city, Columbia South Carolina, instead of New York, but otherwise followed as much of the ‘recipe’ as I could.

Soda City Salute

Soda City or Columbi-Yeah, take your pick, I don’t care

We’re just hot, famous or not, and sweat rolls down your hair

in July and August, who the hell tries to put on a music festival in the summer?

Foreign films at the Nick, Taco Tuesday at the Whig, either one fills your inside

Here’s to JJ the Boom Box Guy for a decade of jams, a couple of decades out of stride.

Want photographic proof of all that I’m claiming? Ask Sean Rayford, he wrote the book.

And raise your hand if you hung out with Danny Devito in Five Points, “Hey, is that… look!”

“He was hiking on the Appalachian Trail” is a perfectly logical thing to share,

were it not for so much water so close to home. Three rivers to hike and you went there?

I used to camp out for tickets in a field where the Koger Center now stands;

The Coliseum will soon join the score of buildings erased from my collegiate lands.

I’ve heard Columbia referred to as “The Armpit of the South”

But I’d put its biological reference point somewhere much farther from the mouth.

Sing me home, Daniel Machado, with tales of Dixie, and beer.

Take the racism, and the fear, and the meanness out of here

And let people be without having our dysfunctional government interfere.