Duende, p.7
Duende, page 7
of imprisoned skin screamin’ for release
from over-worn tight-fittin’ fabrics
& eye remember smiles
dazzling as daybreak,
& soft as mother’s
warm embracing eyes
& eye remember love
in the grass sweating as rivers
from our fused flesh
eye remember thrills
eye remember smiles
eye remember love
in the grass sweating rivers
from our fused flesh
eye remember sadness
eye remember St. Louis
river rhythm town under
sun/moon laughter,
river blues town, filled
with blues people
doin’ blues dues thangs
& eye remember death
shattering as daybreak
II.
WHOSE DEATH IS THIS WALKING TOWARDS ME NOW
whose death is this walking towards me now
eye know it’s not mine, eye left mine
behind, back at the undertaker’s
so who belongs to this corpse that just passed
me now, wagging a st. james version of the bible
or was it the readers digest version
look, his eyes are black & flat as crushed
shadows, deep as hot tar pits
whose corpse is this walking towards me
now, eye know it’s not mine—
eye left mine behind
back at the cemetery
ODE TO JOHN COLTRANE
With soaring fingers of flame
you descended from Black Olympus
to blow about truth and pain: yeah,
just to tell a story about Black experience.
then the flames left your fingers and soul,
came winter you lay down
in cold snow
and was cool.
But during the bebop-filled avant-garde summers
you weaved slashing thunderclaps of sound
weaved spells of hypnotic beauty,
blew searing extensions of sublimation.
Trane Trane runaway train smashing all known dimensions
Trane Trane runaway train smashing all known dimensions
Hurtling thru spacelanes of jazz
a Black Phoenix of Third World redemption.
eye say Trane Trane runaway train smashing all known dimensions
Trane Trane runaway train smashing all known dimensions
With immortal pure sounds of brotherhood
turning and churning inside you,
boiling and steaming and exploding,
until reaching a stratified piety
whose deity was universal truth
eye say Trane Trane runaway train smashing all known dimensions
Trane Trane runaway train smashing all known dimensions
In sheets of sounds of injustice
you poured forth the bitter truth, the agony,
the pain, but making even that
seem beautiful too
J.C. J.C. John Coltrane, J.C. J.C. John Coltrane
You blew your fingers to smoking cinders
preparing for the “Ascension,”
blew beautiful sad death songs
on “Kind of Blue” mornings,
blew love on “A Love Supreme,”
now the ages await you,
beyond the infinite darkness,
where the “Bird” of bebop slumbers.
But rage rage rage Coltrane!
Rage against the taking of a vision
Rage rage rage Coltrane!
Rage against the taking of Life!
For after Life eye know of no other vision.
And there is no guarantee
that one will follow bringing sight
to the place beyond my perception.
But eye concede to time/scarred myth of grand possibility.
eye concede to this, but to no more;
cause my life been filled with grand possibilities
but most have shut their doors.
But this be no mere cry of self/pity.
Naw, eye don’t look at life that way.
Eye am the pessimistic realist
who sees death as final and ugly;
waxed faces, unreal smells in mortuaries;
and flowers that rot upon mounded clay.
If Ojenke or Curtis Lyle were to die
eye would cry. Eye would remember times
that we ate and drank and laughed and chased
beauti/ful Black Women thru streets of Watts together.
Eye would remember new poetry
read in back rooms;
eloquent statements on the pig’s inevitable doom:
bringing restoration of the waste of the people,
and that was resurrected from the dance
upon smoking cinders of love.
Eye see death—as only eye can—
as a hushed kind of deep vast silence,
where roosters never crow
to herald the leaving of deadness,
where the clanking of chains is soundless
when dragged across the bottomless floor;
death is the infinite vigil beyond the door of Life;
death is the lengthening ocean of night
where there shines no light.
Yeah!—eye admit it!—death to me seems forbidding!
Descending into unexplored pits all alone;
pits of inescapable gloom where the air is heavy and dank,
where all flesh has fallen away leaving bones,
and soon the bones are no more,
only the crumbling grave/stone remains
to tell about who you were.
Death is weekends where great hornmen remain silent;
the “Bird” Lester Young Eric Dolphy Clifford Brown
except on ancient scratched-up records
on phonographs of old/timers
who lounge speaking of the good/old days
of dilapi/dated or polished rooms.
Those who followed you thru spring
thru summer thru autumn into winter,
those who watched you scatter the phalanx of jazz
and send them reeling and searching for cover,
those who remember your cry from “Round Midnight”
beauti/ful, esoteric, searing, when it flamed over
the entire sky, prelude to earth shaking thunder and fire
of “Equinox,” these friends
who acknowledged your greatness quite early
will weep the hardest and the earliest.
Those who were familiar with your agony.
Those who were familiar with your pain.
Those who felt the hotness of manhood
surge like flames thru their veins, yeah!
These are the ones fear will not claim: they will cry;
“Kulu Se Mama” “Kulu Se Mama” “Ole” “Ole” Coltrane!
“Kulu Se Mama” “Kulu Se Mama” “Ole” “Ole” Coltrane!
Those who felt the prick of hypodermic death needles
hung off loaded in some shabby dark room,
who drinking wine and dying chased america’s illusions
thru cold rank streets steeped in delusion
garbed in the evil mantle of white doom,
who sucked and fucked and jived and shucked
in strait-jacket tombs of insanity,
who came to the game in hopeless pain
and thought his mangled body to be the cobra’s fangs;
who died just to be doing something different.
Who were witch doctors of intrigue.
Who were voodoo/men of death.
Who were ghosts called hunger.
Who were men called sweat;
not men of “SEN-SEN” smelling death,
but men of halitosis smelling death!
Who shot “smack” to ease the pain
of rapes by savages of innocent Black Mothers,
who shot “smack” to ease the torture
of lynchings by white savages
of noble Black Fathers,
who shot morphine to ease the agony
of “Blondes have more fun” type Black spinsters.
These ebony maidens who are prostitutes of the soul
who hoped and groped thru the “Jackie” mystique
went plunging an decadent into the “Twiggy” mystique’
lost Black beauti/ful Women: chasing images of impossibility
while dancin’ and swingin’ to the down blues beat
of the philosopher of the Black masses, yeah!
James Brown James Brown Black Brown James Brown!
splendid rhythm of hips that sway
sing you not a song for the Trane?
sing you not a tune of lamentation
for this sacred bard, this jujuman—like you
whose song was about pain and love
and whose heart was very gentle with love?
And you Johnny Mathis, nightingale with the clearest chime,
will you not croon the Trane a line
of love and enduring admiration?
And what of you conceited weavers of rhyme?
You Poets, spilling unfinished drinks
upon the carpet of these times
sitting mesmerized by cheap wine
writing: “It’s time it’s time to write those lines
but I’m too drunk to do it now,
I’ll wait until tomorrow to do it,
but it’s time, it’s time.”
And tomorrow coming and going
leaving unquenchable footprints of yesterday
and you the fearless warrior-poet
lying stone cold dead in your lead head
gripping an unfinished poem to Trane in your head.
Death has no sympathy for the unfinished.
And genius and greatness? It feels
not one way or the other.
It simply comes like the exalted thing that it is:
Alone, and unescorted into any room—the room perhaps!
bringing news of dimensionless wandering.
Yeah, Trane! I’m gonna weep for you!
As will Miles blowing sad songs of style!
As will Poets writing wondrously sad elegies cry!
Yeah! I’m gonna weep for lost and pain Coltrane!
But during moments of future clarity
eye will see you as Black John the jujuman,
Black Phoenix who soared sky high! and even beyond!
Breathing love fire light upon a dark vast night
speaking about years of monumental human agony!
Trane Trane John the Baptist, Ohnedaruth,
immortal burning flame of Black jazz,
jujuman running wild over galloping Black Music,
eye give you this poem of remembrance,
the most sacred gift this poor Black man has.
Trane Trane John Coltrane, you came and while here
breathed light love upon cold red sky
dripping with blood death and ire
so that Black music love
would not falter and die,
eye say rest rest rest Coltrane
Trane Trane John Coltrane
and sleep the deep sleep
of all the ages. . . .
THE SKY EMPTIES DOWN ICE
the sky empties down ice
winter grows quickly in your face
of crowded ashtrays
you say
you have come this far for cigarettes
fun & a warm adventure
in bed
but your razor nails
clawing my back
tell me
another story
meanwhile the sea whispers
rapture on the other side of time
pigeons drop slimy
shit into
your vanilla ice cream cone
but don’t get angry
just yet
just because this moment defies
gravity takes off & lands
just there
where a fart just left
all eye know is this:
the sky is emptying down ice
& winter is growing quickly in your face
of crowded ashtrays
in your butt-end face
of crowded ashtrays
HALLOWEEN PARADE IN GREENWICH VILLAGE, 1978
it was the night of your funeral mama
the ritualized mourning night of your death
& at the head of the affair
a black man selling luminous green bracelets of light
then a space man plastic arrows flashing on & off
a richard nixon double stalks in clown costume
rubber face long curled-up harlequin
shoes juggles silver balls
as dracula bites a young girl’s neck
on bleecker street eggheads bobbing up & down
skeletons grinning gyrating bones saxophones
wailing deep in the unreal noise
conga drums underneath the muffled night
pulsating tight runs as tambourines
rattle the drunk & staggering night
now fabulous masks pop out of the crowd
like champagne powered corks cold-cock eyeballs
of people sequins waving cat-tails funny witches
rake long silver fingernails transmit light
dance up & down fire
escapes up side walls of buildings drowning
& saturated in rainbowed flights of color
sight octopus like twenty-foot gondolas
of silk jitterbugging the night
as a pig in a red satin dress switches
her oversized rubber-packed poontang quivers
a trembling tall wolfman on stilts shivers
two styrofoam black gloves
hold moon faces of two uptight men-girls
framed like twin sunflowers in their plucking fingers
a flute choir floats rhythms over space & sights
two screaming homos swapping spit
crossing seventh avenue south the parade claws
traffic packed ten blocks back in the night
honking its whining anger
slide now down greenwich street
hook a left on west tenth pass patchin place
(time keeping the heart of the energy) moving
pass jefferson market library
which used to be a church & before that on the other
side of time the old women’s clocked high tower
of detention where angela davis once looked out
& down from on molasses cheering crowds—
old-time ritualized masturbations—
but where now mama
& on the night of your funeral mama
the ritualized hour of your death
a gigantic spider waves its eight legs
then folds them back over its abdomen mama
beneath the cheese-faced dial of the high
tower clock mama where black hands still turn
around time but where now this gigantic gyrating spider
mama is gripping its eight legs around the church spire
mama appears to make love shivers in climax
mama turns voices into agitated flights
now the drums move away carrying the spirit
hubbub of the thing unrecognized that holds us here
past peter’s backyard charcoal room
in front of which
a two-headed pig holds titties of a possessed dracula girl—
cackling like that clawing hissing girl thing in The Exorcist—
while the two-headed pig thing mounts& begins humping her
with a four-foot rubber penis
a sing-song man with a t.v. for a head screams:
give me your money
give me all your dreams & money
eye sell sleeks cars guaranteed to fall apart in three years
sell sewing machines poison eye stitch into your ears
& eyes sell bona-fide illusions packaged mannerisms
just for your use give me money
give me all of your dreams & money
1984 has arrived
now the drums up ahead call us to turn mama
at fifth avenue rip van winkle on roller skates
& dressed in orange black & purple cruises by
sashaying the parade laid now dead up in the cut of its own rhythm
moves past feathers now
(above which the fine lady from mississippi lived over once
before she moved in with yours truly & blew her final chance of staying
a swinging young bachelorette)
comes to washington square park on top of whose spotlighted
lookalike champs-élysées gateway perches a red-suited devil waving blessings
like the pope welcoming everybody to the final destruction
of this american bacchanalia
now television cameras roll their shadow-catching eyes
prop lights splash darkness to the bone with light
a beggar drags by pre-arranged rags
two more fags in rock drag fall out with one another
scream at each other over whose tongue tastes the sweetest
while a latin band warms up the square with salsa
languaging the park
spirit runners slip in & out the dark
mounting rhythms lovers themselves to flesh
richard nixon’s double-take juggles silver balls
bad as rubber checks
the band leaps into burning salsa
sways the people cooks & turns passion
into joy on the very edge of frenzy
rockets go off in the sky of margaret’s eyes
whose smile is a kiss
as a ten-foot high silk dragon with people for legs
rides by stunning night air above rhythms the crowd is dancing
holy inside salsa spirits moving away inside themselves
while outside the park a pale man in white lace
directs traffic with jeweled conductor’s baton
rollers under his hairnet yawn open
their gulping mouths looping
bleached blond arrogance
now at the end of this strange affair mama
the black man still jaw-jacking selling green bracelets
of light ringing corded necks as the weird man
with the t.v. for a head is still screaming
we fall out of the dying confusion into the restaurant
volare which in italian means to fly
eye ease on up next to margaret
