Jazz

Jazz: be all we got against tyranny,
a hat of pork pie
outlasting jive-ass lies,
blasting out casted notes
into see-through overcoats
to better expose operations
covert-that-hurt & send votes
to mend our democratic vista,
Mister Kurtz, like that flag Gadsden wove 200 & 2 score years ago whose snake said to King George,
greed-gorged depravity,
Don't tread on me, knucklehead,
our emperor's new clothes exposed by a jester's
gesture: the proper goose cooked
to the propaganda hooked on unknowing hordes booked
knee-deep in the boring mediocre.

 Evil's what's got us thickening the hell-realmed plot
while love beams the sweet shot
to heaven's jackpot,
why jazz protests
the banal, delights the ear, arrests
the dead
& as for makin' little girls talk out of their head,
bumba-clot pop-schlock sells the big lie
while horns cry a burnin' proof
from dues' sidelines. Maggie is alive on a hot tin roof!

Jazz: Go weave us a flag amber-waved,
made from the betrayed,
erased & retired, out-sourced, payday-delayed
& downsized stray.  
Go join the neglected,
infected
& defiant who say amidst AIDS,
racial profiling Patriot Act,
you can't sack
free speech so get back, sneak attack.

Jazz: Be a round mound of light,
the muse who refused to be burned out,
what never went gently into that good night,
a Coney Island of the mind singin' a body electric's shout.

From outer space
to chthonic place,
the craw
in the maw
& the hollowed whole of it all,
lyrics we can't dismiss
any more we could our mothers or our inheritance.  
We don't breathe in music,
Mingus, winged music takes circular breath in us!  
We need horns, 'bones & lyres
to sing truth to powerfully complex military-industrial liars,
why Rahsaan wrote "Theme for the Eulipions" - to bring together the minions of artists & troubadours & say we are legion!  
Improvisation knows the reasons why caged birds sing & a monkey signifies, 'mericanest of exports in a world hypnotized in un-free.

Jazz puts the lead sheets back in the fold, a circle unbroken, a feat complete, a love supreme, a song divine.  To whom the bell tolls, that's the mission:  musicians united in an uncommon re-birth of wonder.  Jazz: don't go asunder --- be a cry for nation time.