America has always been a cauldron of inconsistencies; so often in our history we’ve ended up with brilliance, tolerance, and progress only after every other option has been exhausted. We’re at it still, with willfully ignorant cowards, cretins, and opportunistic shit-stirrers hoping an alternately roiled and apathetic populace will focus on trivial differences while missing the big picture (hint, it has nothing to do with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but a crusty and soulless percentile dividing obscene amounts of wealth and setting the world ablaze, as the White Capitalist God intended).
But still. Even at times when the most recalcitrantly optimistic amongst us feel hope is a sucker’s game, I find it instructive—and inspiring—to consider that, to take only one from many other examples, this country, which beats and stymies its best citizens, is capable of producing a genius like Thelonious Monk. Despite every systemic disadvantage and all obstacles placed in his path, he lived, he played, and he makes us all immortal. Any country that can claim “Straight, No Chaser” is worth preserving and fighting for.
Onward and Happy Independence-ish Day. 
(p.s.: if heaven exists the solo that begins at 3:17 is what you hear as you stride into the light.)
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.
