Jazz Poems

IN PRAISE OF BUDDY BOLDEN

  1. You have shown me dissipation, the tome, the rhythm, and cool sonorous blue…
  2. The right consciousness is always dream, it wakes in us ideology and topos.
  3. Not only the blues like melic, like persimmon and soda.
  4. Not anything, just blonde sorrow.
  5. I can’t wait to choose my own fall, the bass and pica.
  6. Did you taste the drug, the white words of sound…
  7. Nothing will prepare me, not even drums and delusion. I wander in their halls, their tantrums. But mine was apparatus and rebellion. The plumb edifice of transgression.
  8. When we play, nothing else matters, not the placards on the train, not the yet and the how. We find plums and pendulums.
  9. I told them that this was not enough. No horses, no shoulders, no fields to drown, only blankcotton testimony and confession.
  10. When we leave, we leave the pipe and parts of the body. You whistle like a factory. Me, like an empty room.
  11. I would like to test myself, and remove these old tunings and feathers, these tulips.
  12. Do it then. Leave for the salty tincture of the city, the North.
  13. The leaves were all cankered when I returned. Like a salvo I burned. Not for them. Not for this place. But for this rotten reflection. The only true rejection of process.
  14. You meant to leave the phonetic terror of the moon, the New Orleans horn of sand and distraction.
  15. Leave me to fall. For this is all that I know. I accept, I accept this black stone of mine, mine own three lives, my crime.

LUCIEN QUINCY

from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young

SUITE TABU 200

More Posts: ,,,,,,