The Last Thoughts of Jeff Buckley in Memphis

I have that precious and irreplaceable luxury of failure, of risk, of surrender

                —Jeff Buckley

If something happens to me, then you’ll be free!

And I want you to be free: how does that Presley

Song go? I want to be free, free, free, yeah

Free—I want to be free… like a bird in a tree.

And here by the river alone, by the Mississippi,

There’s one last song I’m gonna wade into. See,

I was raised to sing wherever I was in a house

And now, it seems, I have no house. How does

That Tom Waits song go? Wherever I lay my

Head, that’s where I call home. I say

I have no house, but that’s really a big lie.

I’m renting down here. I can sing in this place,

So maybe I’ll buy. That is, if I don’t die

First. Why so grim, you ask? There’s joy,

I suppose, in my voice somewhere. So they say.

I don’t hear it, myself. And that’s because

I get myself all hung up in the blue, or weigh

Myself down in the freighted churn, heavy currents

That I hope to God will carry me to our unchained redeemer,              

            Jesus.

My last thought is... that I had no last thought.

I’m just singing along. Whole lotta love! But… But… 

The Hallelujah is what you can’t put into a poem.

Now I have no house but the waves (the river has waves).

I’ve left no notes: only some sketches for an album

Of tunes that was, I guess, intended to save

Me from going down, or out, or into the hurling rain—

From the pain that I worked so hard to earn.

Where it came from, where I come from, doesn’t concern

You, but please listen to these wild thoughts I’ve hung

On staves, that are fit to garland the graves

Nobody thinks to visit, in places I confess I never

Went to except in a nightmare, and in the posthumous release

            Of this song.