Jazz Poems

WALKING PARKER HOME

Sweet beats of jazz impaled on slivers of wind

Kansas Black Morning/First Horn Eyes/

Historical sound pictures on New Bird wings

People shouts/ boy alto dreams/ Tomorrow’s

Gold belled pipe of stops and future Blues Times

Lurking Hawkins/ shadows of Lester/ realization

Bronzer fingers–brain extensions seeking trapped sounds

Ghetto thoughts/ bandstand courage/ solo flight

Nerve-wracked suspicions of never songs and doubts

New York altar city/ black tears/ secret disciples

Hammer horn pounding soul markson unswinging gates

Cultural gods/ mob sounds/ visions of spikes

Panic excursions to tribal Jazz wombs and transfusions

Heroin nights of birth/ and soaring/ over boppy new ground

Smothered rage covering pyramids of notes spontaneously exploding

Cool revelations/ shrill hopes/beauty speared into greedy ears

Birdland nights on bop mountains, windy saxophone revolutions.

Dayrooms of junk/ and melting walls and circling vultures/

Money cancer/ remembered pain/ terror flights/ 

Death and indestructible existence

In that Jazz corner of life

Wrapped in a mist of sound

His legacy, our Jazz-tinted dawn

Wailing his triumphs of oddly begotten dreams

Inviting the nerveless to feel once more

That fierce dying of humans consumed

In raging fires of Love.

 

BOB KAUFMAN 

 

from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young

 

More Posts: book,classic,collectible,history,jazz,library,poet