Jazz Poems
LISTENING TO SONNY ROLLINS AT THE FIVE SPOT There will many other nights like this be standing here with someone, some one someone some-one some some some some some some one there will be other songs a-nother fall, another–spring, but there will never be a-noth, noth anoth noth anoth-er noth-er noth-er Other lips that I may kiss but they won’t thrill me like thrill me like like yours used to dream a million dreams but how can they come when there never be a-noth– Paul BlackburnFrom Jazz Poems | Selected and edited by Kevin Young
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Jazz Poems
SNAKE-BLACK SOLO For Louis Armstrong, Steve Cannon, Miles Davis & Eugene Redmond with the music up high boogaloo bass down way way low up & under eye come slidin on in mojoin on in spacin on in on a riff full of rain riffin on in full of rain & pain spacin on in on a sound like coltrane my metaphor is a blues hot pain dealin blues is a blues axin guitar voices whiskey broken niggah deep in the heart is a blues in a glass filled with rain is a blues in the dark slurred voices of straight bourbon is a blues dagger stuck off in the heart of night moanin blike bessie smith is a blues filling up the wings of darkness is a blues & looking through the heart a dream can become a raindrop window to see through can become a window to see through this moment to see yourself hanging around the dark to see through can become a river catching rain feeding time can become a window to see through Quincy Troupefrom Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
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Jazz Poems
THE BLUES OF THIS DAY The blues of this day are as elegant and as sad as the minor thirds and we all try to sing it. What we want is to be brass The horn-scratched voice blown through. Valves as golden as his. Lord as crazy sex or first real heartbreak. It was always his back slightly bent away from all of us who adored him, gazing across his shoulders as the band jumped into the party one solo at a ti Or they could be rocking way off-ke going as far away from the melody as Venus to Mars. Funk can be as easy as t getting together in the dark. And as hard as the breaking light that catches the throat of sated lovers, the morning after. The talk the night before by the last of his men who knew the way of the world and then some, about Miles and his two steps ahead of the century like the first Black man to leave the Delta humming I gotta go, but I can’t take you. I gotta go, but I can’t take you. If you want to follow, then do what you want to do. Patricia Spears Jonesfrom Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
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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
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Jazz Poems
THE BUDDY BOLDEN CYLINDER
It doesn’t exist, I know, but I lovev
to think of it, wrapped in a shawl
or bridal veil, or, less dramatically,
in an old copy of the Daily Picayune,
and like a nunstaled, unhatched egg
from which, at the right touch, like mine,
the legendary tone, sealed these long years
in the amber of neglect, would peal and re-
peal across the waters. What waters do
I have in mind? Nothing symbolic, mind you.
I meant the sinuous and filth-rich
Mississippi across which you could hear
him play from Gretna, his tone was so loud
and sweet, with a moanin it like you were
in church, and on those old, slow, low-down
blues Buddy culd make the women jump
the way they liked. But it doesn’t exist,
it never did, except as a relic
for a jazz hagiography, and all
we think we know about Bolden’s music
is, really, a melancholy gossip
and none of it sown by Bolden, who
spent his last twenty-four years in Jackson
(Insane Asylum of Louisiana)
hearing the voices of people who spooked
him before he got there. There’s more than one
kind of ghostly music in the air, all
of them like the wind: you can see it
but you can see the leaves shiver in place
as if they’d like to turn their insides out.
WILLIAM MATTHEWS
from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
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