Jazz Poems

CHARLES PARKER: ALMOST LIKE BEING IN LOVE

These are the shadows of water when water

is thick and no longer transparent

They are everywhere–on the walls

across the ceiling.

It was always this good.

One night you undressed me in your sleep.

Very slowly, you told me later. You said I smelled good.

The sweater i said I’d taken it

out of the drawer where I kept

my winter clothes.

It smelled of pine and a long summer.

No, you said. Not wood.

More like the inside of a saxophone case,

all velvet and sweet regrets.

All blues, I said. Blues

and whatever shadows are made of,

I said, falling on you like slow water.

DIONISIO D. MARTINEZ

from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young

SUITE TABU 200

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Jazz Poems

CHARLES PARKER 1920~1955

Listen

This here

Is what

Charlie

Did

To the Blues.

Listen

That there

Is what

Charlie

Did

To the Blues.

This here,

bid-dle-dee-dee

bid-dle-dee-dee

bopshop

have you any cool?

bahdada

one horn full.

Charlie

Filled the Blues

With

Curly-cues.

That’s what

Charlie

Did

To the Blues.

Play

That again

Drop

A nickel in,

Charlie’s

Dead

Charlie’s

Gone,

But

John Birks

Carried on.

Drop

A nickel in,

Give

The platter

A spin,

Let’s listen

To what

Charlie

Did

To the Blues.

WARING CUNEY

from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young

SUITE TABU 200

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Jazz Poems

ELEVEN

From Velvet Bebop Kente Cloth

There ain’t/No word

I ain’t/Heard

ain’t/No word

Bird/Ain’t heard

Language is an/Inventor’s

>Privilege

I/Blow psalms.

I/Blow sinners’ deeds.

I/Blow prayer before death.

I/Blow curses.

I/Blow laughter.

I/Blow vocabulary of my axe.

You can’t/Hold

folks/Down who Be-Bop

but you/Kin hold

them/Up.

Every Be-Bopper/Renew

his/Subscriptions

to/Genius when he riff some

thing/New on his axe.

STERLING D. PLUMPP 

 

from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young

SUITE TABU 200

 

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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

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Jazz Poems

FOR MILES

Your sound is faultless

pure & round

holy

almost profound

Your sound is your sound

true & from within

a confession

soulful & lovely

Poet whose sound is played

lost or recorded

but heard

can you recall that 54 night at the Open Door

when you & bird

wailed five in the morning some wondrous

yet unimaginable score?

GREG CORSO | 1930~2001

Youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs

from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young

SUITE TABU 200

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