You know this one. Once upon a time, you go on a date. It’s been a while. Too long. Like that stretch of desert that gives way to hallucinations that give way to death and vultures that descend and strip your bones of the sad meat you thought set you apart from others.

The date goes better than you have any right to expect. You go bowling or boating, or there’s a band playing at the tavern down the street from that new concrete Jesus-box that looks like a mall except for the gun turrets. Hell, you were set to measure the evening’s success by the relative absence of embarrassing moments and stains on your only date-worthy shirt, but you do better than that. You exceed the minimum. Your date confirms it. You’re lovely. Pass the bottle of Hot Dang.

Twice past sunset/

The second date’s even better. The movie’s sad as coffin socks or funny as a middle-school fart. It hardly matters which, sad or funny, because you both feel it, the shared thing behind the obvious. Afterwards, at that little restaurant where the lights are dim and they put a candle in the empty green bottle, the simpatico goes electrical and, well, Friday night becomes the musky port from which you sail into a future of promises and shared goals. The two of you henceforth will proceed as one.

There’s nothing left to do Monday but cheat.

Twice past sunset/
ain’t supposed to be

So there Bruiser and I stood, at his house, one song and two podcasts about poetry and songwriting under our manly belts. I confessed I’d just written a second set of song lyrics for another musician, a guy Bruiser didn’t know, dude named Kevin Matz. “It’s called ‘Honey and Glue,’” I said. “What’s it about?,” Bruiser asked. “River song,” I said. “About desire that’s jumping the banks.” “Like a river,” he said. I nodded. “There seems to be some guilt,” I added. Bruiser nodded. We looked out our separate windows in a similar way.

Twice past sunset/
ain’t supposed to be/
out back of this bar

Here’s the mess I caused. Contrary to the wishes of the novelist friend whose request for a podcast led to “Once I Had a Sorrow,” our first song, I leaked the second podcast in which Bruiser and I talked about how my corner chair, a rhyming dictionary, and whiskey held a late-night confab that produced lyrics Bruiser turned to song the next day. That podcast closed with Bruiser singing the song. “Now I got a woman/ Now I got some kids.” We were saved by responsibility, he sang, saved from liquor miseries by the duties that come with being husbands and fathers.

The guy I leaked the podcast to, Matz, did nothing more than say (in that asking way), “Get drunk and write me a song lyric, Davenport.” Something blues-trippy, he said. At the time, the singer in his band was a woman. I conjured a bar in Grafton, Illinois, a river town just below the confluence of the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers , a town unprotected by levees and therefore a town that floods, a town I know well. I would have conjured a bar twenty miles downriver at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri, in Hartford, Illinois, my first hometown, but you can’t see the rivers from there. A dependable levee blocks the view. Good for keeping your feet and ass dry. Bad for poetry and river songs.

I admit I wondered what Bruiser would think if I sat in the whiskey chair with my rhyming dictionary for some other songwriter. And then I sat in the whiskey chair with my rhyming dictionary for another songwriter.

Twice past sunset/ ain’t supposed to be/
out back of this bar/ your hand on my knee

Sometimes it goes that way. In “Once I Had a Sorrow,” the first song, I went in thinking two parts pure rhyme to one part off (or slant) rhyme. I came out the other end with “sorrow/rainbow/elbow/wish/dish” and “bottle/yodel/awful.” In the second effort, “Honey and Glue,” I decided on very simple, pure rhymes and imagined I was stringing words for a singer like Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs or Alison Mosshart of The Kills and The Dead Weather.

Shrink Chair says you’re happily married. Why a song about cheating? I said it could have been a song about anything. Shrink Chair says coincidences tell us things about ourselves. Shrink Chair says we express the poetry of hidden intentions when we knock a rhyming dictionary up against a bottle of liquor and out pours a two-timing, word-slinging, hard-rhyming river rat.

Twice past sunset/ ain’t supposed to be/
out back of this bar/ your hand on my knee/
Got to die, gonna live/ Aiii, Aiiiiii, Aiiiiiiiii

Halfway through the lyrics, I was already waiting for the phone call. Matz’s band would trip-bomb some blues-screech to match my catchy words, and Alison or Karen would have no choice but to cover the song and make us rich as an offshore banker’s ex.

So it was weird a couple of weeks later when I asked Matz about the song and he said that he was going to sing it. He? He? How would Karen O hear herself in his voice? Screech-bomb I had rigged for a woman fell right out the window, far from the money. When I told Bruiser because I thought he’d understand my pain, how an artist can lose control of a thing, he responded by saying he wanted to do his own version of “Honey and Glue.” Songwriting Etiquette 101? Fess up? Tell Matz you’re cheating on him with the guy you cheated on to get the lyrics to Matz in the first place?

Your hand between/ ain’t supposed to do/
down river up river/ honey and glue

You can do that. Except before you do that, email a friend, someone like Elizabeth Majerus, from graduate school, a poet who used to play in a three-woman punk band, and ask her to meet you at a local coffeehouse to talk about what you call a “collaborative project” because you don’t have a better way of explaining your plan to avoid the charge of cheating on A with B and B with A by going public with the addition of C. You tell yourself you’ll look less like a serial adulterer moving from one oblivious partner to another and more like the host of an exciting salon. Elizabeth agrees to look at the “Honey and Glue” lyric and, if it’s workable, come up with a melody she and her husband will then flesh into song for their band Motes. Partners working together. Openly. Honestly. Imagine that.

The word “collective” doesn’t occur to you until she leaves, and as you wave good-bye, you see an ex-student who can play the guitar and sing. He listens to your pitch and comes aboard. It’s that easy, though when you think about it, what’s happening, beginning to form, a group of artists with a shared vision built on risk, a group you’ll come to call Art Box Collective, you wonder what you’ve gotten yourself into.

Got to go gonna fall/ Aiii, Aiiiiii, Aiiiiiiiii/
Got to live gonna die/ Aiii, Aiiiiii, Aiiiiiiiii

Truth is we all fall and Life’s final act ends in Death every time, so why not hand off my lyrics to musical folks who might do something with them that I can’t? Why not say, as I did, that changes are acceptable, expected, encouraged? Keep the title, I said, and retain the spirit of the lyric, but put your thumbprint on it. Stamp it Shared and Original. In good faith, I offered a “Honey and Glue” lyric reduced by two-thirds. Be true, I said. And then I crossed my fingers.

Matz’s “Honey and Glue,” the one I imagined would return in a series of Karen O shrieks? Alterna-Barry-White slow-jam make-out. Bruiser got raw with his “Honey and Glue,” stripped the lyric way back, blues-yelped it as he banged on a baritone ukulele and stomped on a suitcase to keep time. Motes slowed it back down with beautiful guitar work, a solid bass-and-drums groove, and Elizabeth M’s hypnotic voice delivering, as she put it in a deft lyrical addition, a “sweet mess” of all that honey and glue. I thought at first she’d added “sweet-NESS.” Then I heard it the way she sang it, the way she turned the phrase like a pro. I heard the poetry of “sweet MESS.” Damn. If that’s not what she wrote and sang, I claim it as what I heard and therefore helped invent.

Ain’t supposed to be/ twice past sunset/
your hands my knees/ out back of this bar/
Ain’t supposed to do/ up river down river/
making all this/ honey and glue

Over the next year, seven more songs with the same title, “Honey and Glue,” arrived. David Ball, Kevin DeForrest, Monica Gaston and Arynne Shaw, Zack Salerno, Herr Fizzcrash, Russell Evatt, and MMMMDCCV Orchestra–they all knocked it out of various parks in various ways. You can hear the proof here. You can hear later efforts by Motes here and Bruiser here.

Got to, Gonna/ Got to, Gonna/
Aiii, Aiiiiii, Aiiiiiiiii

The coolest thing about it? There’s room on the shelf for more if you have an idea, some ability with melody, and a willingness to jump into a “sweet mess” of your own. You can do like some of us did and put up a show at a local bar to a large audience. Not all of Art Box Collective could be there that night. MMMMDCCV, based in Chicago, had yet to deliver their version. Gaston and Shaw live in Florida, Herr Fizzcrash in Washington, DeForrest in Iowa. Russell Evatt? He drank a beer with me that evening in the back of the bar, listened to one of the “Honey and Glues,” and said he wished he’d signed on for the show. Here’s the next best thing: Russell sending some “Honey and Glue” from his living room.

Got to, Gonna/ Got to, Gonna/
Aiii, Aiiiiii, Aiiiiiiiii/
Honey and glue/ Honey and glue/
Got to, Gonna/ Honey and glue/
Aiii, Aiiiiii, Aiiiiiiiii

Bruiser’s waiting, drink in hand, for me to explain the mysteries of songwriting. I will not. I cannot. All I can do is narrate in hindsight what happened as I was cooking the words. What I mostly know is that if you write a lyric that’s simple enough and hand it to creative, musical folk with full disclosure (my recommendation), you can get lucky and create a community of songs, a box full of them, all with the same title, yours, which you then have to, get to, share. And if you’re crazy lucky, someone will do cover art half as hot as the cover art Xiaorong Jajah Wu, vocalist for MMMMDCCV Orchestra, did for us.

That’s the sweet-NESS of the sweet-MESS we made.

Repeat chorus