photo credit: Bill Cottman 

Until It Sounds Like Jazz

Nihilism compromises jazz

Bloodstream and fault lines

Trap us in layers of inherited attitudes

And ancient expectations

Dynasties of dubious repute

Align with catastrophe

Darkness

Ugliness

And the struggles of oppressed peoples

The rapping of the Earth

And too many beautiful blunders to count

My life is protest

A willful disobedience

To status quo

My existence is a hunger strike until

The occupation of my own body

Is more evident than being occupied

By values and activities forced on me

By the other

For the other

In service to their cause

I’m growing accustom to hunger

Inconvenience and awkwardness

Becoming narcissistic

In order to save my soul

Deriving erotic gratification

From admiration of my own physical

Spiritual

And mental attributes

This river is not flowing from a rock

But around it

Undeterred  

Its headwaters trickle in from

Melting consciousness that broke

From ice that got too warm 

Words

Music

Images

And kinetic expressions can heal our wounds

If we are courageous enough to apply them

Like balm or medication

If we use them to treat chronic

Cliché and rhetorical babble

If we practice originality like

Life is on the line

If we wrap idea seeds in elephant dung

And pour water on the ground

We may survive the onslaught

Of soulicide

Art is not a hammer

Though it may be used on occasions

To drive in nails

Pound out dents or to knock

Something loose from its obsolete connection

Art is not a hammer

Though it has a clawed end for prying

As well as a blunt head for bruit force

I guess I've already contradicted myself

Because the hammer in my hand

Has made an image in your mind

As functional as the wood handled

Iron head dangling from a carpenter’s belt

Hammer tool and instrument  

Mallet for a xylophone

Gavel call to order

A lever that strikes piano strings

The percussive cap striking the primer

The firing pin

The cock

The claw prying loose music

From limits and constraints

Moving

Raising

Leveraging possibilities

And the cosmology of quantum realities