This poem has two sources of inspiration, this um,..unique..photo prompt from JackAz Photography for One Shoot Sunday(link below) but more importantly, my deep admiration for the surreal post-modern existential, nihilist poetry of the great
to whom I dedicate this humble offering:
the jazzman gets the blues
the jazzman came to Wyandotte
he was lookin to play.
he had his axe in a worn out case
looked like it had been pissed on
by a thousand dogs--
black, peeling, no stickers--
and a bone box with a
beating heart
in his back pocket.
the jazzman found a corner by the bus station
where the winos were huffin it up
from a paper bag.
decided it looked like a place that
needed accompaniment,
so he took out his sax and made a noise like a combine
on a july day in Longview.
the winos left.
an old latina woman on her way to work
threw a quarter in his case
out of pity.
the jazzman left Wyandotte
because he’d paid his dues
and hitched to the West Coast.
he had some money left
but he let the
truckers and salesmen
feed him anyway.
he finally made it to L.A.
and cast the hairy eyeball around.
he was wiped out and freakin,
needed bong hits and bedrest.
he was lookin to get laid.
he did.
scroungin a gig was harder
but he hooked up with a whacked out bass player
from Fargo who made everybody call him Fats
two hipsters with guitars
and a rastafarian on the conga.
they called the band the Lounge Lizards.
they played Manny’s Chuck House every Friday
for two months.
the jazzman thought his chops
were finally there.
then the waitress Manny was boppin
ran off with all his bread, and Fats.
Manny went flat busted and got kidney trouble.
The one guitar player's old lady had him
thrown in the slammer
for ten years' child support
and the other went mariachi in Tiajuana.
the rastafarian kept playin the conga
but it was no good, man.
the jazzman was frosted.
he had to agitate the gravel.
he left L.A. thinkin about Wyandotte.
he still had his axe and his dogpiss case
but he was runnin low on reeds
and he thought he might be
gettin the blues.
there was a flick at the time--
it was bitchin, about Death Stars.
it razzed the jazzman's berries.
he knew he needed a schtick, so he kyped a violin,
got the vader threads, and learned to hiss and wheeze.
he wrote a song called “I’m your big daddy-o, Luke baby.”
it bombed.
so the jazzman hit the road
for the last time.
he thought he met Keruac once
outside an old diner in St Paul
but it was just a shadetree mechanic
named Dwayne. he never made it back
to Wyandotte and he lost
the bone box with the beating heart
somewhere just north of Burns Flat
when he got those hellhound blues, Clyde,
really bad.
February 2011
