This is a song, not a poem, and it should be read against the standards of its form. Twelve-bar blues lyrics operate on repetition-with-variation rather than image accumulation, and David observes the convention closely. The AAB structure appears in the opening verse: line one stated, line one restated with a small change, line three delivering the turn. “Lighting up the whole damn room” is the payoff the two setup lines exist to earn, and the mild profanity does what mild profanity does in blues, which is signal that the singer has stopped being polite about how much he means it.

The vocabulary is deliberately borrowed. Baby, Lord, moonlight, a heart, a hug. A reader coming from David’s Muse poems, with their Möbius strips and Archimedes spirals, may find this thin. It isn’t thin; it’s genre-appropriate. Blues does not want novel diction. It wants inherited phrases delivered with conviction, and the pleasure comes from hearing a worn line land in a new arrangement.

Two moments break the template, and both are the song’s best. “Coming home from your night shift” drops a working woman into the middle of a love lyric, and the specificity is startling in a form that usually deals in archetypes. She has a job. The job runs late. The smile survives the shift. Nothing else in the song locates it in an actual life the way those five words do.

The second is the title reversal. Blues is a music of loss, and “love’s how the blues still glow” repurposes the entire genre: the blues doesn’t stop being blues, it keeps burning because love is what fuels it. Then the gold line closes the loop. “Till my soul is lined with gold” arrives in verse eight; “that gold is you” arrives in the last line and retroactively identifies the source. The lining wasn’t a metaphor for feeling. It was her.

Set beside “BB’s Blues” (published August 2025), a pattern emerges: David returns to blues form when he wants to write about ordinary devotion rather than exalted devotion. The Muse poems reach for the cosmic. The blues songs reach for the room, the shift, the hug at the door.

As a lyric it works, and it would work better sung than read. The AAB verses scan cleanly, the refrain is genuinely singable, and the closing reversal gives the song a reason to exist beyond pleasant sentiment. “Coming home from your night shift” is the line a good arranger would build the whole track around.

Two weaknesses. The middle section loses its meter: “That smile’s a gift you give me / Don’t cost a single dime of pain” pairs with “Lord, it hits me right on time,” and pain-to-time is a rhyme the ear expects to arrive on the same beat, which it doesn’t. A rewrite of one of those couplets would tighten the spine considerably. Second, the song stacks four consecutive “gift” and “holy” statements before reaching the gold verse, and the accumulation flattens where the form wants variation.

The larger question is placement. A blues lyric sits oddly among poems on the Poetry Blog unless the site signals what it is. Read as a poem, the repetition looks like padding. Read as a song, the repetition is the architecture. Whatever category and framing this gets should make that clear to a first-time reader.