Memphis Minnie’s classic blues line “I want to be your chauffer” was miscopied in an early Folkways recording song transcription as “I want to be your shoebox.”
I want to be your shoebox
I want to be your Fort Knox
I want to be your equinox
I want to be your paradox
I want to be your pair of socks
I want to be your paradise
I want to be your pack of lies
I want to be your snake eyes
I want to be your Mac with fries
I want to be your moonlit estuary
I want to be your day missing in February
I want to be your floating dock dairy
I want to be your pocket handkerchief
I want to be your mischief
I want to be your slow pitch
I want to be your fable without a moral
Under a table of black elm I want to be your Indiana morel
Casserole. Your drum roll. Your trompe l’oeil
I want to be your biscuits
I want to be your business
I want to be your beeswax
I want to be your milk money
I want to be your Texas Apiary honey
I want to be your Texas. Honey
I want to be your cheap hotel
I want to be your lipstick by Chanel
I want to be your secret passage
All written in Braille. I want to be
All the words you can’t spell
I want to be your International
House of Pancakes. I want to be your reel after reel
Of rough takes. I want to be your Ouija board
I want to be your slum-lord. Hell
I want to be your made-to-order smorgasbord
I want to be your autobahn
I want to be your Audubon
I want to be your Chinese bug radical
I want to be your brand new set of radials
I want to be your old-time radio
I want to be your pro and your con
I want to be your Sunday morning ritual
(Demons be gone!) Your constitutional
Your habitual—
I want to be your Tinkertoy
Man, I want to be your best boy
I want to be your chauffeur
I want to be your chauf-
feur, your shofar, I want to be your go for
Your go far, your offer, your counter-offer
your two-by-four
I want to be your out and in door
I want to be your song: daily, nocturnal—
I want to be your nightingale
I want to be your dog’s tail
-Catherine Bowman
