Another wonderful Facebook memory prompts me to recall how incredibly productive things were, this time seven years ago, albeit not in the ways I’d intended. To recap, I headed up to the Noepe Center for Literary Arts to manage an amazing writers retreat (the vision of my dear friend Justen Ahren), and work on a novel. I ended up writing a lot of poetry, and this return to an earlier love has only intensified during the subsequent years (and has resulted in two published collections —The Blackened Blues and Rhapsodies in Blue— which include poems written during those purposeful months in 2016).
The picture, above, shows the various drafts that produced one of my personal favorite poems, “Bud Powell’s Brain” (thanks again both to Sequestrum, and Routledge for including it in the anthology Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era).
Bud Powell’s Brain
Was it that hard-boiled cop’s unindicted Nightstick
that scrambled your system, sending misfired messages
into the soft-wiring that polices ungovernable impulses?
Or was collateral damage already done? Chemistry coalescing
the onset of sickness, like a chick pecking through its shell?
Un Poco Loco: an epitaph for stillborn souls that can’t
escape the yoke of adversity; Nature’s always improvising,
uninterested in excuses, or anything that could plausibly explain
the roots of Squares—and circumstances of those serving them.
Poached forever by the eyes of the White and the Other
Color, printed in numbers on top of paper pyramids:
E Pluribus Unum—a private club you’re forbidden entrance,
even decades after your death, a pitch black Ever After
that tastes and smells like vanilla extract and crackers, Jack.
This world’s never been accommodating to hard cases, helpless
to understand languages they’re confusedly fluent in, and
like a conjoined twin, it smothers thoughts and steals oxygen
from a disobedient brain, inflamed by anger or alcohol or
something stronger, risky antidotes for those inscrutable squawks
you’ll transcribe for anyone, willing to open their ears
and better still, their wallets:
Fat fortresses dispensing the only justice
served after last call.
Something you can score, like love
or junk in any back alley.
Unless you can’t
afford the going rate.
Which means, like always:
You’re broke.
(More about the sad and extraordinary life of this troubled genius, here.)
