Free Verse
A Performance
Piece
Bongos are
optional …
(The beat of the night)
Musical
accompaniment for about 30 seconds, and then ....
Bongos are optional
if you can find them these days
relegated to attics,
stacked on the bebop dust
with seventy-8s of Dizzy blaring,
and speakin' Salt Peanuts:
Salt PEAnuts --- SALT PEEEEEEENuts
Byrd squawkin' and squeakin' his
Sax late into some hot memory of
a 52nd street club and Miles' trumpet
so cool it was beyond cool, IT WAS
cool raised to the power of cool
the power of infinity
in the
jazz
night
somewhere
in the Village
where
Greenwich and
Bleeker are
Where … the ….
Village vanguards are
Where …..
Johnny Staccato snaps his fingers
in a BEATNIK backroom
beat
thick
with that blue
smoke, that
kind-of-blue smoke
snappin' his fingers to the bottom
of a backbeat
bass, the mute of a coronet
jazzed on that jive
junk, and
blowing his brains out
into the velvet
of the night
where out back
subterranean slammer Kerouac
kept typing his life on an endless roll
until the roll rolled no more.
Bongos are optional when
I bleat about
The bee and the bop and the birth
of the cool that haunts the ghostly lines
of every jazz poem; about the despair
and desperation of all
Who wrote and drank,
Who drew
and cranked,
blew
and finally
gave it up
to the beat of the night.
© M. Kleiza 1999
