that Mack
"The Knife" Last
Name unknown, seen
slinking 'round the corner, maybe
like a knife
punch-driven home
(but that is not a knife's "home,"
baby - or
is it, though?
The point unclear), it
seems The Mack
is superstarred!
In jazzy minds, strewn points afar
all smug and snide, ironic; kind.
Such-fancied selves,
and hard
as marbled fat in mind,
and mean
as penny nails
in salvaged boards.
A slinky, vile predator
such as the world quite right
abhors
just as the world quite wrong
regales
itself on takes and shimmied tales,
such tails at peace,
now stilled
forever: murdered whores
and laborers, stepped wrong
cut short,
lives unexplored,
and no one seems to know
or claim that body, alley-found.
So pearly-white and sharp
she was. Once. Oh, her?
Oh once, she ruled
this town.
Oh, no one seems
to know her, now.
Her name or nickname,
even gender/sex
object, once oozing life
now caked and dried.
No one's upset.
Some disturbing facts wrong, here: the body in the alley was almost certainly a man, possibly Lou Miller himself (whose disappearance with the money is snidely implied designed). Yet tantalizingly possibly someone else. We don't call bodies in alleys "disappearances."
ReplyDeleteIn any case, it's widely almost-sure that Mack's short for MacHeath. In which case it ought to have been first name Unknown "The Knife" MacHeath.
This had the entirely wrong scansion for jazz, as usual. So fact takes it up the uckingfay ass, naturally.