Jazz Poems
MELODY FORENSIC
If someone told me I only had one hour to live,
I’d spend it choking a white man. I’d do it nice and slow.
MILES DAVIS
Years in the gristle of knuckles. Thick muscle
at the palm’s base. Fingers squeezing,
digging valve keys to mold exhales. Some pain
pinched by the reed—would it wail
if you found a pink neck before leadpipe brass?
Forgive the epigraph. Don’t apologize,
your music may taste funny to someone
after reading this. But damn Miles (if I can call you
Miles) why do black men have to scream in art?
What wants off our tongue floats
in the same ether lungs feed wood-wind
(now you got me doing it). Listen
if “I hurt” falls deaf on their ears,
Kind of Blue is no different.
The black-sound congeals in mason jars
lined across the tops of rickety stoves.
We been frying our story, over-seasoned
with silences. Miles
(I’m calling
you Miles) you don’t want to play. Sweet indulgence—
let’s pretend we’re back at the Five Spot, the poem
just another stage light. Move it,
put the trumpet down. Where would you start?
Maybe there, Mr. Cool at the bar—hear lolling,
eyes wilted from you blow,
a coil of saliva in his throat so
sure he can swallow your blue note whole.
KYLE DARGAN
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Jazz Poems
FEBRUARY IN SYDNEYDexter Gordon’s tenor sax
plays “April in Paris”
inside my head all the way back
on the bus from Double Bay
Round Midnight, the ‘50s,
cool cobblestone streets
resound footsteps of Bebop
musicians with whiskey-laced voices
from a boundless dream in French.
Bud, Prez, Webster, & The Hawk,
their names run together riffs.
Painful gods jive talk through
bloodstained reeds & shiny brass
where music is an anesthetic.
Unreadable faces from the human void
float like torn pages across the bus
windows. An old anger drips into my throat,
& I try thinking something good,
letting the precious bad
settle to the salty bottom.
Another scene keeps repeating itself:
I emerge from the dark theatre,
passing a woman who grabs her red purse
& hugs it to her like a heart attack.
Tremolo. Dexter comes back to rest
behind my eyelids. A loneliness
lingers like a silver needle
under my black skin,
as I try to feel how it is
to scream for help through a horn.
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA
from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
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Jazz Poems
BIX BEIDERBECKE (1908~1931)
January, 1926
China Boy. Lazy Daddy. Cryin’ All Day.
He dreamed he played the notes so slowly that
they hovered in the air above the crowd
and shimmered like a neon sign. But no,
the club stayed dark, trays clattered in the kitchen,
people drank and kept on talking. He watched
the smoke drift from a woman’s cigarette
and slowly circle up across the room
until the ceiling fan blades chopped it up.
A face, a young girl’s face, looked up at him,
the stupid face of small-town innocence.
He smiled her way and wondered who she was.
He looked again and saw the face was his.
He woke up then. His head still hurt from drinking.
Jimmy ws driving. Tram was still asleep.
Where were they anyway? Near Davenport?
There was no distance in these open fields–
only time, time marked by a farmhouse
or a barn, a tin-topped silo or a tree,
some momentary silhouette against
the endless, empty fields of snow.
He lit a cigarette and closed his eyes.
The best years of his life! The Boring “Twenties.
He watched the morning break across the snow.
Would heaven be as white as Iowa?
DANA GIOIA
from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
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Jazz Poems
suddenly in the midst of a game of lotto with his sisters
Armstrong let a roar out of him that he had the raw meat
Red wet flesh for Louis
and he up and sliced him two rumplings
since when his trumpet bubbles
their fust buss
poppies burn on the black earth
he weds the flood he lulls her
some of these days muffled in ooze
down down down down
pang of white in my hair
after you’re gone
Narcissus lean and slippered
you’re driving me crazy and the trumpet
In Ole Bull it chassés aghast
out of the throes of morning
down the giddy catgut
and confessing and my woe slavers
the black music it can’t be easy
it threshes the old heart into a spin
into a blaze
Louis lil’ ole fader Mississippi
his voice gushes into the lake
the rain spouts back into heaven
his arrows from afar they fizz through the wild horses
they fang you and me
then they fly home
flurry of lightning in the earth
sockets for his rootbound song
nights of Harlem scored with his nails
snow black slush when his heart rises
his she-notes they have more tentacles than the sea
they woo me they close my eyes
they suck me out of the world
ERNST MOERMAN Translated by Samuel Beckett
from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
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Jazz Poems
THE JOURNEY
Miles was waiting on the dock,
his trumpet in a paper bag.
Lady was cold—
wind lashed the gardenias
I stole for her hair.
We were shabby, the three of us.
No one was coming so I started to row.
It was hard going—
stagnant, meandering…
The city moaned and smoldered.
Tin cans on the banks like shackles…
To be discovered, in the open…
But Miles took out his horn
and played.
Lady sang.
A slow traditional blues.
The current caught us—
horn, voice, oar stroking water…
I don’t know how long we floated—
our craft so full of music,
the night so full of stars.
When I awoke we were entering an ocean,
sun low on water
warm as a throat,
gold as a trumpet.
We wept.
Then soared in a spiritual.
Never have I been so happy.
LAWSON FUSAO INADA
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