One enters writing contests the same way one plays the lottery: with hope but no real expectation. I was, therefore, surprised and delighted to be awarded 2nd Prize in Bethesda Urban Partnership’s 2020 Poetry Contest. (As it happens, the poem in question, “Notes from Underground,” hits uncomfortably close to reality right now, but perhaps that’s not entirely coincidental.)
This poem reflects a love of jazz, and sadness at how many geniuses –who made some of the best music in human history– walked amongst us, unrecognized, impoverished, and dispossessed by a society that neither understood nor appreciated them. The same society we see alive and unwell all around us, today.
Notes from Underground
“Don’t I have the right to be crazy if I want to be?”
That woman cleaning high rise offices after hours
once bellowed the blues in speakeasys, pimps roaming
the ‘hoods in three-piece suits, tossing bills on stage
like alms in collection baskets, a religious ritual from
days when dead presidents could make cops colorblind.
This janitor the middle school kids call Pops is the best
guitar player nobody ever heard, because only anointed
cats signed by labels cut records, and studio work wasn’t
near enough to keep the heat on in Philly, or anywhere
else you stopped to live when you weren’t on the road.
The invisible man—catching mist from the car wash
Slipstream—spent more money on cigarettes he smoked
between sets than he makes in tips, split ten ways each shift
with co-workers whose fingers get numb from buffing steel,
the same way he ceaselessly scrubs memories from his mind.
That defenestrated scarecrow sporting five coats and fewer teeth—
who now counts time conducting traffic for change, or else stalking
the defunded psych ward—still hears the cheers from sold-out gigs,
back when the Blue Note buzzed like a honeycombed fortress full
of queens and soldiers, all extracting honey from air sticky with gold.
