I Want to Be Your Shoebox
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
