Three pieces -
- "All Right" (song)
- Jazz Poem (read live at Pianofight, San Francisco)
- To Own a Car in San Francisco (archive recording I dug up from 1999)
About that jazz poem. I believe I heard myself say in the interstitial patter that I'd include the text of the jazz poem in the podcast blog. Why, that would be right here.
The version of the text in the podcast is lightly abridged. But here is the full "Jazz Poem" as it appears in my book Pieces, Items, and Sundry Shorts.
A Jazz Poem
I'd like to read you my poem
about
miles
davis.
boooooo-aaaaaaah!
boooooo-aaaaaaah!
transgressive
semiotic on stoned gold chuckwagon
ridin' that
five-and-dime express
half
six dozen of a birdbath catharsis griddle.
boooooo-aaaaaaah!
i met
her in the
rain
rain
like plastic bucket of enthusiasm fish
plastic:
not a metal pail
rain
like
drippy
fruitmeal
say i
met her in the rain
on the
jazz
train
jazz
reverie cool & quotidian on nasal early afternoon midnight
of
ghost-hour
stanchion thoroughbred greenskeeper mongoose
jazz
jazz
jazz
jazz jazz
jazz jazz
jazz jazz jazz
jazz
jazz jazz
jazz
like coleman and coletrain and ella and monk
herbie
and billie and dizzy and duke
–
personally, sonny rollins is not to my taste –
but
jazz, like parker and bird and mingus and miles
miles
miles
miles
of jazz run ripchord down landscape of kosher corn beef and hash
served in rusty beercan
of
a denuded middleclass dream
of
fixed-rate mortgage diner-food
Armored
Personnel Carrier pretty puppy
with
side
of
jazz
like
stilton wallflower emulsion junto pony nematode homology felcher dipilatory
ape-chime
punchdrunk flywheel
graft
9-&-three-eighths-type
jazz
jazz
in angry underwear
like houseguest on electrified rug.
part
two:
the education
of
miles
davis
Miles
Davis was born on May 25, 1926 in Alton, Illinois, soon moving to East St.
Louis where he
flew the fly as high as went by
binged the
bang to fling the fang
ran in the sand to live
free of the man
and it
was JAZZ, jazz like international turpentine gestalt
like cary grant and
rosalind russell stranded in the Shan Plateau Range of western Myanmar
with nothing but a
quarter ream of ledger paper and a masonjar of pickled duckbills
jazz
like
miniskirt tirade of vegetable government
undue
TOEFL exam in salad of jackrabbit wonderment
tornado
pillbox of post-secondary nasal drip
soybean
guttersnipe of preponderant dwarf
herein
lay the education
of miles davis
Part Three: A Puzzling
Numerological Interlude
1 the taste of licking a stamp, when
there is no stamp
2 primrose blossom yields open to spring
3 rice bran breakfast cereal
4 the number four
5 is two plus three: therefore, primrose
and bran
6 primrose times bran
7 primrose times bran, plus that stamp
that isn't there
Part Four: precisely
sixteen random
words
Serrated
masonic throwpillow necrotic stromboli encryption lug skedoodle venison
proximate vegas ant-gargle shrimp if scrum bamboozle ass-turnip
Part Four-A: some
conclusions
in the
beginning, miles davis
then.
jazz poetry.
in the
end: an octopus
it
always ends
with
an octopus
,
she
said
on
that
jazzzz
trainnnnn
***
And with that we prematurely conclude our podcast season. 24 episodes were planned, 21 were pushed out; and among the three episodes in limbo, the series finale (a rock opera named Psychonaut) went back on ice in November 2016 - where it had already been since 2001. But the unfinished projects will all be back someday for their revenge
So, till next time!
