I’m happy to announce that my first poetry collection, The Blackened Blues, is available wherever you buy books (yes, *wherever*, so you don’t have to put more money in Rocket Man’s pocket; you can go directly to my publisher, Finishing Line Press, or support my pals (and 1455 partners) at D.C.’s The Potter’s House).
THE BLACKENED BLUES is part of a large and ongoing project that discusses (and celebrates) some of the author’s personal heroes who remain far less celebrated than they deserve to be. As it happens, many of them are musicians, hampered in various ways by discrimination, ranging from old fashioned racism to institutional and cultural indifference. Though there’s an elegiac sadness suffusing these poems, there’s also acknowledgment of defiant genius: they fought their battles bravely, in their art and in their lives. This collection seeks to capture something (or, hopefully, more than a few things) essential about their lives, bearing witness while also paying homage.
I’d like to introduce the collection, one poem at a time (in the order they appear in the book), and tell a little bit about the inspiration for each, by way of explanation and in tribute.
Next up is “Shafi Hadi’s Silence” (originally published by Empty Mirror as “Where the Hell is Shafi Hadi?”).
(*Saxophone player Shafi Hadi, born Curtis Porter, is best-known for his association with jazz legend Charles Mingus, and played on the seminal recording Mingus Ah Um, from 1959. He dropped out of the scene in the early ‘60s and the reasons why, and his current whereabouts, are unknown.)
Shafi Hadi’s Silence
i.
Those sounds, not falling on enough ears
then. Inaccessible, unknown, unwanted—now.
Today, where audiences vote for winners
hand-picked by specialists called consultants and
marketing departments with both barrels aimed
beneath the bottom line, a nothing-in-common
Denominator for something once considered sacred,
Art—or was it something else altogether, something
Important? Jazz was actually a matter of life and death:
Beautiful but always too short: the note, the feeling,
the connection, the song, the show, this life.
Made in America: a way to relate invented
by the people, for the people, for sale, forever.
Because it was meant to last it could never last,
at least long enough to survive our obsession for
new things, and the old-fashioned notion of
interests and attention spans longer than shadows,
cast quietly in a smoke-soaked nightclub.
ii.
Who did we become? Over-rehearsed and under-employed,
outcast or worse, obscure enough to not warrant a second
look: unrecognized in familiar places no one knows about
Or bothers to go because nothing happens there anymore.
Where did we go? Into used record bins and basements,
burn-outs or bums, teachers or else repurposed as working
stiffs, at offices or in asylums or out on the streets, the ones
who knew they were never going nowhere:
Tripping always over those sticks and stones that
kept us high and put us under the earth,
slings & arrows of outrageous misfortune: all
the effort, all the energy, all the discipline, all for nothing.
What did you think? We could eat the air and drink up
the Nothing like nourishment? No, it was sketchy enough
when we looked into the dark and eyes looked back at us:
Two-drink minimums and overpriced appetizers keeping
the front of the house solvent for a few more evenings.
Even then we shuffled & scrapped and kept hoping that
these works-in-progress—also called our lives—would
mean enough to enough of you that we could keep
the act intact, long enough to do something more than survive.
Or else avoid seeing the light that meant everything was
over: the gig up, the profits gone, the sounds expired.
iii.
What the hell, I say, the world never owed none of us
a living, and who said anyone should feel sympathy
for men making sounds no one asked to hear?
For solidarity with a handful of humans exploring
the spaces in between us and what we used to call
the underground: that backstage some are born into,
asking, Are great artists born or made? Or else:
Who cares, the best ones find their way, always, or
get found, discovered, rescued, rehabilitated even
after they die. But what about the ones left behind
The seen? The ones keeping the beat or blasting
their melody, the ones on the front lines behind
the man, side-men no one would know, in the grooves or
on the bus. How could you say you know me when
I don’t even know myself (no more)? No more time,
no more chances, no more luck, no more life.
So when do we go? Is it that same old song
and dance with Death? The unhappy ending all of us
nod off to, humming some tired tune when time’s up and
the band plays on—around us while we stumble or stretch,
happy, blind, scared or sensing something sort of like bliss,
Into the dark? Is it, in the end, the opposite of that sound we spent
a lifetime learning and playing and loving and lamenting?
The one sound we all reckoned would still linger
after the last encore of the greatest show on earth:
Silence.
