the man lived through the passage of phrases
monastic intensity coupled with mindful pleasures
aesthetic concerns triumphant as a whip crack
it’s crucial to make certain playback is accurate
vital to know that one’s own concerns are met
impossible to write
poetry after death camps
the world
yes the mélange of real and symbol and whim
the ‘world’
is surely – his world – surely dead
so no there is no system that permits
one to accept
two dirty notes as the new
and no fair trade
pan flute for a snare drum
smudge chords as you play
and welcome barbarism
music is too important to be left and far too imperative to be right
who was this hoodoo man
this voodoo princeling
this old bourgeois Marxian
this brilliant inheritor of German
musical economy
political psychology
but Teddy
there was tone
and melody
and structure
and time that would not submit
to 12-toned angels
incommensurate
your knowledge and that jazz
ColtraneDavis
EllingtonBasie
ParkerDizzy
you should have let the Angel play her game with history
in the mood for love
after kulture got gang raped and gunned down
April in Paris
shaved heads and complicity
my melancholy . . .
so blown and squeezed into soft atonal slaps
Herr Doctor all is forgiven in the text
and wrong on one score old sir
we can let that page blaze
and listen still in sore and torn amaze
_________________________________________________________________
Published in Rampike Vol 16#1 (Conceptualisms Issue)
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