AN IDEA OF IMPROVISATION WITHIN THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE
(a free jazz of ashes buried or scattered by a dead? cat in a different key)
These are perhaps
some points
on the musical taste of
The Black Raspberries,
although we thought
the shrubs might be
mostly petals and
it was quite a pinch
when a light note later
the purpose of the thorns
entered us
for the first time
like a Pointillist painting
of a pond that Cecil
tailored in the moment
by pleating with
some fate
we couldn’t
fathom back then,
yet felt again
and again beyond
the petaling of
those phrases,
in the syntax
that arranged them,
not ours
to diagram,
like a garden,
but to enter in,
and sometimes
to venture out,
before the feeling
seemed to
nearly inspire
some type of
blade-dancing
raised up to
the point of
a sound science.
The Endopoem here is:
"Perhaps the light of a pond beyond the diagram but feeling nearly the point of it."
FATHER, SON AND THE WHOLLY GHOST
We pray mainly
in the alleys of memory.
There, shards of smiles glitter
on the ground,
but here we wear the same name
—almost—identical scars,
though you can’t or won’t
remember what date I was born.
Something trickles
down the side
of my face.
In some versions this may be all
you have taught me:
needles are hollow lies
and collapse as many families
as veins.
Now a prisoner in death's camp,
you wither each day
until we may count your T-cells
with one hand.
When the phone beckons
and Mama’s voice begs
Please buy a dark suit to wear
I may be wrong—
but I say
don’t some of us
wear black
all day
everyday
anyway?
Endopoem:
"We pray there but here you can't / In some versions a prisoner we may phone but don't"
THE COLTRANE IN YOU
(por il miglior fabbro)
probably begins
before the first Oh!
of any emotion
to möbius like the circle
at the center of God.
Meaning inky-haired & lightheaded,
you start to dream of tracing—
in tree frog hues—
a sonic essay
that Alice or Stevie
(in Wonderland)
arranged over doubts
the black of our mouths
splay open.
And since the tint
is half the sound
your belief,
(in the feeling of faith
rather than gothic of god)
becomes more than
mere ode or elegy
borne in a mouthpiece.
Isn’t that why
at the wheel of the warship
of worship you vie
for the harmony
of suspended chords
in righteous unravel
or strive to maroon
at the bluest end
of Duende?
Perhaps this means
certain starred charts
—once incomplete—
have now become
your guide
in a bitter suite
as incensed ropes of smoke
muscle music from hunger.
Splay, how “What if?”
preys to probe
the pouty mouth
of imagination—
cartographer
of our interior—
to query if
it’s the lion or angel
in “Evangelion”
that extends
the swing of most triads
or swells our
Hammond organs?
And since all great musicians
know there are only
twelve ways to kneel
and kiss the ground,
surely the second O
of said emotion frays
to mean all things
in modulation,
how therefore to be drawn
around a circle of fifths
ruled by ratios—
even irrationally—
as you Picasso keys
into a piano’s grand motif.
A quasi Cubist riff—
perhaps brayed into a bridge—
to re-choir
something like
the Acknowledgement
of our father.
Maybe a relative minor
to absolve some resolve
towards Resolution
or flip the full-hipped logic
as you Bearden the burden
of our double basis
until battered sticks shatter
and every Zildjan shivers
with symbols unseen
of the quest inside
your questions.
Because a talent
may also be a weight,
your gift gives pause—
purpling in turbulent
Pursuance of relief
—wind from a box—
spilling like
certain bottled spirits
—e pluribus unum—
until God is an American
Sonnet Wanda worked
into the Psalms
of our unanthemed hands.
Since prayer is a petition
people sign with their lips
your ongoing gaze flips
inward to cast bated phrases
that nearly sync
in their artful craft
bobbing about
a more Lydian theory
of the Lyric
on modal lines
which appear
to conflate
or conflict
until they’re well nigh
wholly writ.
The 3 Endopoems are:
"The first dream arranged doubts our mouths half sound" / "Circle of fifths Picasso riff a logic of shivers" / "Wind spilling bottled spirits into prayer"
AN IDEA OF IMPROVISATION WITH MISSING TEETH
As a kid, Pythagoras
(my purple plush toy)
made joyful sounds
only I could hear
until a bike sprocket of logic
severed his single horn.
Newly numb,
I sought to sew together his song
and thus took up the trumpet.
Pythagoras praised music
as sacred math,
numbers raised to the highest power.
Maybe here I could raise
how the brains of birds
seem to beg for beauty
as they bear the seeds
of notes in their beaks.
Maybe my school trumpet begged
to be muted when moonlight
flooded our shoebox apartment
as I practiced what beauty was allowed.
Some say Pythagoreans
accounted for the lyric
as a sine of certain numbers
in our universe.
Perhaps the bird part of our brains
co-signed the seeds of language
because it longed to fill our tangents
with evergreen musing about music.
Can’t the needles of a pine
and the needles of a phonograph
both sew scented air into song?
Have you ever smelled oil
in a trumpet's breath
or felt rhythm uncoil
to kill time round midnight?
Logicians claim death
has many fugues—but little logic—
and yet wasn’t death somewhere branded
with the fugitive logic of the fleur de lis?
My boy T claims this might be
the truest thing about music:
a lyric can be a useful essay,
but an essay is a useless-ass lyric.
Sometimes I imagine lyrics
collecting on lips as dew
on Dogwood leaves.
Say silly you leaves your school trumpet
on a train coming home,
but that stray horn never holds it against you.
Maybe I also took up the horn
to note something about holding Latricia Taylor
and collecting her breath
in the bowl of my collar bone.
Say after an errant elbow
knocks loose a front tooth,
you try to pick up
your horn again,
but red graffiti scrawled
in a school bathroom stall
claims a one armed man
will never play his violin.
Doesn’t every trumpeter’s mouth
resemble a red wound?
Suppose you could read sheet music
easily as your Beloved’s grocery notes,
but not read their most notable longing,
because you only knew Desire
as a housing project
in a city famous for its trumpet players.
Some nights I think
Pythagoras merely heard music
as the grammar of sound making sentences
but, listen—who among us hasn’t
also needed to number the hoarse notes
galloping out a bridled mouth?
The 3 Endopoems are:
AN IDEA OF IMPROVISATION AS COMPULSIVE PRAYER
What’s the difference between chocolate and any other pleasure darkened? And pray tell which desire registers deepest in a casino—those giant shrines to Apophenia—such that a man who wagers by probability and therefore can’t be addicted also can’t stop trying to solve this woman (who has arrived to serve him dissolved spirits) like an Incompleteness Theorem? Is it the Vagus Nerve which causes octaves of chocolate in her skin tone to French Horn into harmony in the hallways of his mouth? If you’ve ever wagered and lost it all, you might know why a choir means to gather, but what could it mean to hymn? Let us pretend that the phattest asymptotes don’t curve into forever as we query if any door besides endorphins numbs our hunger round these numbered wheels. And if said door is mascara black or lipstick red. Which shade of hymn best befalls the shadows of balls briefly brushing whatever digits he seeks? None? Is this the part of the arc where we act uncertain if Schrödinger’s cat is black as a clarinet strung around Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s neck? Or the part where our gambler compounds his losses by denying the hymn of her name arranged in red is a litany he would petition dark arts to learn? Pray tell, does the darkest logic of chocolate involve merely pleasure barred — or — how sweetly it bids us swipe our debit cards in the register of longing?
The 2 Endopoems are:
"A casino a man an Incompleteness Theorem" / "Black lipstick a clarinet compounds her dark logic"
I feel like I've really only scratched the surface of what I can do with this, so it's pretty exciting to play around with it and see what all is possible. I haven't decided on what I'll do about line breaks when I print the Endopoems apart from the base poem. There are decent arguments for retaining the original breaks or for using new line breaks. Anyway, that's what I've been up to writing wise for the last year or so. I'm vaccinated so I can't wait for live poetry readings to start back up.
