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 “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.
