Once again gratitude to the good team at Jerry Jazz Musician for championing my work. This poem actually appeared late last year but I didn’t update the blog, so here’s a chance to revisit (and this one does not appear in The Blackened Blues, but will certainly be part of the next installment!). If you’re new to Thelonious, here’s a piece I wrote many moons ago (which could serve as ideal introduction to both Monk and Duke Ellington).
Obligatory audio accompaniment (and my .02: If there is light at the end of the tunnel, the sound you hear as you stride toward it is undoubtedly the cornet solo, on this tune, by Thad Jones).
Thelonious Monk’s Moods
Imagine the ocean
and holding it
Back
with only two hands,
and one outsized mind.
Only God,
or the moon,
can move the tides.
And since God is dead
that’s a Hell
of a lot to ask
of one man.
So what do you do
When the water keeps coming,
wave after wave,
the salty weight of this world
Crashing
every other second
On the shore:
full of scoffed pebbles
like stars scattered
Far Out, in space.
What is music
if not the art
of uncontainable energy
checking itself?
Notes from Underground:
a crepuscular kind of occupation
(since custom or tradition,
or transcendence—
lost in translation—
compels it?)
Listen:
You think you’re ill-equipped
to unravel these misteriosos, and
what they’re saying, or from whence
they came?
Imagine
being The Man
Who heard them
First.
Thinking & dancing & Rhythm-a-Ning
his way through life’s mess
of magic and mystery.
The loneliest monk
transcribing such sounds
like some new bible:
The ugly beauty
of brilliant corners.
If that piano could talk…
It would sing a song
of salvation and sorrow,
and the ways
we make ourselves
insensible
to the ecstasies,
those man-made
miracles some consider
a sort of sustenance.
They say Monk went silent
‘cuz he said all he had to say,
But couldn’t it be true
That he just got tired?
Speaking, or eavesdropping
On himself, obliged
to that breaking sea
inside his head, not
broken but disabused.
Unwell, watching
immodest clock-thumpers,
gone gray
in stifling suits:
Evolved
in the art of becoming
Invisible.
Machines in the ghost, making more
money than sense, evading all
engagement or anything
not on display
in bored rooms.
P.S.
The ocean, after all,
and at long last,
Can always account for itself.
