Nachtmusik
In a Jazz Club, on MacDougal Street,
The horns blow cool, crazy, wild, talking up God, all-hell-and-fury,
Jumping in your brain, naughty and nice, spiraling bare bonecold
Scared of nothing, and immense endless, streams the loud, reckless drop dead
joy
That trumpets feel when they're lucky, rushing forth, clapping a great bell,
And we listen, our ears flung wide like pearly gates,
Those jazz blues pronouncements that teach us how to live,
Chatter the most profound things,
And in the wailing walls of sound, I hear a child call me,
I hear the past, a hundred years, a confession of sins, a prideful strut,
Our lives give way to these jazz musicians whose instruments chirp , hiccup,
fart
That frantic song of Death, Love rumbling out of its tomb
And born dying & helpless the world's all desperate paranoid and crying,
rocking back,
Wicked, big mouth Mama kissing her baby, laughing, running up and down your
spine,
Bebop biting off your ear again and again, sweet as tomorrow,
Naked, large truths bursting in your brain, zombie-eyed, God's secret out,
everybody knows
Jazz eats you up, spits out your bones, cause what you say don't mean
nothing,
And here come that bliss, sorrow, guilt, sin kicking, chirping as one big
sound
Plucks you right up out of your skull, throws you down a hole,
And the quiet-making, mongering deafness roars, sings like an atomic bomb,
And you so gone happy, frenzy loving, mad fool,
You slap your dead daddy and start running around with Jesus,
Until everything good and sacred,
Sticks you in the belly with a knife, takes out your appendix
And waves it in the air, jiggly fish,
Then tosses it down, flip-flops on the floor,
And like a mouth speaks of strange things,
Murmurs the purest thoughts, unashamed, courageous,
Preaches to the dead, boozed out crowd,
The happy starving angry souls
Whose faces resemble the dim facades of bathhouses and brothels,
And lives glow in the curly wisps of cigarette smoke,
And mirthful moments unfold with the piety and pomp
Of a Playboy pinup centerfold,
The heart eager to dance at the coronation of Divine Doubt,
And in the men's lavatory, the urinal flushes endlessly,
Boasting in mystical gargle of how in the minds of madmen burn the fires
Which illumine the everlasting dark,
And past midnight, in the basement of Jazz Club,
The rats are giving birth, and eating their babies,
And the cat in the corner, prepares to stalk in the dark
Something not quite there,
And upstairs, the musicians lay down their riffs,
Swing like birds chirping up the dawn,
Till everything we hold dear jabbers
Gloriously onward, booms deep-voiced
Rhythm and blues, singing scat, scat, whodat,
And an great big orange sunrise
Swoops down and yaps in our bones
Boogie-woogie world, jamming jive-truth,
Rattling, battling far-fetched sacred lies,
Tooting a primal scream, piercing our eardrums,
Blasting us down from the rooftops of boredom,
The hurrah of cannonading drums, the trumpet whoops
Hurl us toward the soft fleshy dark.
Ernest Slyman
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