I’ll sing you the life song and I’ll sing you the death song
of Kirby, Allen Kirby. Kirby played
guitar. First the life song:

In the high school’s library
when he was fifteen and failing out
he found an old Library of Congress album
with Leadbelly playing and singing.
That night walking back home to the Children’s
Home he couldn’t get the scratching
sound of the big man’s guitar
out of his head

At the time he had just about decided to quit school.
But that night, walking home, and then the next
day again sitting hunched at the library’s turntable
wearing the ancient, faintly smelly headphones,
he decided not to quit (yet) because school was
where these records were. In the record bin
he found more recordings by people like
Blind Lemon Jefferson, Big Bill Broonzy, Son House,
Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, B.B. King, others.
He started cutting
class to go sit in the library and listen.

He found this picture

in a book about the blues and would gaze at it while he listened.

He was able to get a job as a stockboy at a local
pool and garden supplies store and after a few months he
saved up enough money to buy a Yamaha 12-string acoustic
guitar. After he bought the guitar he never went back to the job.
Instead he’d sit on the long concrete steps
at the back of the Home
next to a dumpster, a parking lot,
a cruddy picnic table, and play the guitar.

He’d checked out a library book with lists of chords
and songs to play such as “Amazing Grace”
and “Sloop John B.” and
“House of the Rising Sun.” He learned
all the chords and all the songs
in the book, fretting and strumming
till his fingers bled.
When they bled too bad he’d bind
them with clear tape and play
some more. When he broke a string he’d
take the guitar up to his bed and change
the string on the bed.
He found in the high school library
a tape describing how to tune a guitar
and so was able to do this
(after some confusion owing to
the guitar’s second,
thinner set of strings).

Here’s a couple of things you need to know about Kirby:
His Mom dropped him off in front of the children’s home when he
was five years old and drove off with her boyfriend in the boyfriend’s
green Ford Pinto which she and the boyfriend used to call “the Peashooter.”

He never saw his Mom again.
After she dropped him off he cried for three days
straight until the ladies who ran the Home were worried
that he might not stop and discussed taking him
to the hospital which they eventually did where
the boy underwent sedation, after three days
of which he woke up and then cried not again

until a day many years later when he’d learn,
finally, that the woman he’d loved more
than any other, and who’d given birth
to (as eventually became undeniably apparent)
a retarded son, and who’d run off when
she realized this state of affairs (after staging
an ugly, drunken episode on the front lawn
of the Home with declamations
and recriminations screamed at the ladies who’d raised Kirby,
and who'd come to think of themselves as his aunts),

sure, Kirby began to cry when he finally learned
(via the Internet) that Becky was a whore
who (he'd heard it said) made the son retarded
by drinking and fucking through the pregnancy
while Kirby was off on the road
in futility trying to achieve some kind of minor
celebrity or at least financial solvency as an
earnest whiteboy bluesman closing in on his
thirtieth year. When he came back and found out
how Becky had run off and how she’d been a prostitute
and about the retarded boy, perhaps his and certainly
his now, then he sure did cry some bitter tears,
standing there on the back steps of that same house
where he grew up,
those tears rolling behind dark
sunglasses and rolling down
into a wispy brown
beard with 4 or 5 gray hairs. From inside
he could hear the boy beginning to bray
again but his aunts were there to attend.

So there you have it. The beginning
of Kirby’s love song and the beginning
of his death song. The bridge to the tunes?
His hate song and his insanity song,
threading counterpoint, all sung
unto her, his whore, his Magdelene.