Voila!

AN IDEA OF IMPROVISATION WITH THE HORNS OF THE OX IN PARADOX

As a boy, 

the mouth 

of a scarlet plush toy

I named Pythagoras

made horse sounds

only I was allowed to hear—

until the adolescent teeth

of a motorbike sprocket 

severed his single horn.

Newly numb and seeking 

to sew together his psalm,

I took up the trumpet.

Assuming no mistranslation

didn’t Pythagoras praise 

units of music as sacred math—

numbers raised to the highest power?

Note the angle as 

the throats of birds 

raise the seeds of melody

in the sharpness

of their beaks—

is this not the geometry

my school trumpet sought

as moonlight muted

our shoebox apartment,

and I pined to practice

what beauty was aloud?

There are moments

I believe Pythagoras

allowed for the i

in either pine

or lyric as sine of 

an imaginary unit.

But I still don't know,

if the bird part of our brains 

co-signed the cones

of language only to tango

our tangents towards 

evergreen music.

I heard Lee Morgan

raise his blue horn to ask

why scarlet blooms

as the need inside a needle

—whether record or pine—

to sow slivers of air 

into meters of song?

Have you ever smelled oil

on a trumpet's breath

or let three fingers coil

to kill time round midnight? 

Death was once branded

with the fire of the fleur de lis,

but could that be how 

we lost the rhyme 

between wounds and sounds?

I played the horn, 

trying to collect lyrics on my lips 

as dew collects on dogwood leaves.

Perhaps, I took up the horn 

seeking to hold Apophenia

as a useful fiction

and collect her breath

in the bowl of my collar bone.

After an errant elbow 

dislodged a front tooth,

i tried the trumpet again,

but found only 

a ruby hard groove.

Red graffiti scrawled

in a school bathroom stall

said a one armed man

can never play the violin.

But every emergency 

exit seemed to blink—

“Since trumpets sound sharp,

what trumpeter’s mouth 

isn’t an unread wound”?

Have you heard how 

Lee Morgan read 

his Beloved’s sheet music

as easily as her grocery notes,

but couldn’t read

her most scarlet longing?

There are moments

a distant horn moves me

to see Pythagoras 

only knew music

as a grammar of sound,

but listen—who amongst us 

has never hurt to wholly number 

the hoarse notes galloping 

out a bridled mouth?