The Evils Of Jazz

As seat-of-the-pants
as my plans for Boston were,
I was every bit as serious about
attending Berklee School of Music
as any seventeen year-old
could be ...

I'd seen the catalog --
I'd studied the images of
professors,
musicians
and
even the streets pictured
in the catalog,
over
and
over --

brownstone buildings,
Back Bay beauty
and Fenway fantasies
beguiled my jazz maze
incandescent bebop
vision phase ...

it was 1969,
the age of aquarius,
the home of academic protests,
bongo bistro sit-in music fests
in gardens, commons and city squares

to the tune of psychedelic-strafed
extemporaneous insanity
held hostage
in winding orange-blazed skin-head
Hari Krishna singers
dancing on the corner of
Boylston and Tremont
begging
forlornly to business suits
and afro-wielding
mini-skirt, frolic, hormone
vibrant, bell-bottom
leg romps
in the shadow of unrest
movies, hair-brained stage flames
and curious yellow
flourished
orations in the plums of
peeled-banana-LSD extravaganzas

bleeding on Herald-Traveler-Record-Globe
admissions
to culture
civil detonation

I observed it all
from three thousand miles
of innocence
interred

for it was jazz
I wanted
blazing from a bellowing bore
of brass, shellac and triggers
ripping
dirty tones
in a fusion melody

but my mother
tried to quell it all
with an attempted exorcism
of naive will
in Richland,
a preacher assigned to the mission
of declaring
the godless evil of music
contorted
and misconstrued from
straight and narrow flows
of righteous rivers running rampant
in the backwaters
nuclear servitude

but, there,
in the preacher's den
I syncopated
gloriously to the rhythm
biblical thumpitude

and ripped a delighted
glissando
as I left the church
in a cloud
of elated curiosity

inspired by Huntington Avenue,
the road
I craved
to
extract from picture
and tack to the bottoms of my
shoes

josjr (2012 1004)
Stowaway in Boston

Redstone Sunrise

Throughout the night
there was only the vast
emptiness of an
unknown sea
underneath,
giant waves
washing away a landscape
that had names,
colors,
people,
voices,
faces,

but they all seemed to be sucked
into tiny points of light,
crawling painfully,
slowly ––
like bugs or dust
or lost traffic signals
that had become
detached from poles,
wandering aimlessly.

The lush green of Seattle
for which I often lusted,
lamenting that the caravan
seem to be stuck
in some desert rut,
bogged down in desolate dunes,
where trees were exotic,
mountain scarce
and people all seemed
to be from somewhere else ––

but,
the reality is
I was never around long enough
to really know
where anyone was from
because they were all framed,
always
within the chrome borders
of the rearview mirror.

It was reminiscent of the
summer of '66,
where I spent many hours
on Coronado Beach
watching crabs
click sideways,
blowing bubbles
as I built cities
at the water's edge
and watched them dissolve
with each new wave.

This new, dark, sea
beneath my feet
dissolved it all,
a cosmic tidal wave
that left only slide positions
on my bass trombone twitching
my fingers,
my neck,
my lips ––
whispering arpeggios,
glissandos
and pedal tones
over and over
until the sunrise
revealed the beauty
of redstone urbanocity ––
the Hub,
Bean Town,

Boston.

josjr (2012 1003)
stowaway in Boston

Rattlesnake Eyes

That flight out of Seattle --
that flight in 1969 --
that leap from
a 17 year long caravan
was a catapult
from the dark crevice
I had been traversing
from birth.

As person born on a caravan
I didn't know
I was on a caravan.
I just jumped on the
wagon because
that's what I think I
supposed to do,

carried along
by the currents
of a stream
flowing down
whatever dry riverbed appeared
on the landscape,
and I held on --
not because I wanted to,
but because I didn't know
I didn't have to.

That's what I was thinking
when I stared out those
sterile Windows
of that United Airlines flight
rising above Mount Rainier --
blinkless,
cold,
uncompromising,
like the eyes of
rattlesnakes
I once hunted
along the igneous cliffs
outside of Connell,
every bit as frightened
of them
as they were
of me,

as I was of falling off
that caravan.

josjr (2012 1002)
Stowaway In Boston

Poem: Red Eye

Red Eye

Nomads have no home ...
only places seen,
the ground they're standing on
and some place
on the other side of
midnight.

I was once a stowaway
on a caravan I called family,
born on a dairy farm
outside of Houston,
thrown into the trunk
of an old Studebaker
headed west,
but not before picking up
the scent of fresh shrimp
in Corpus Christi
and the taste of countless
Concorde grape filled
communion cups
in a string of mildew soaked
Texas Southern Baptist churches.

Just like any ol' sailor
weary of too much time between
here and there,
I have many stories to tell
on an idle day,
about those first seventeen years,
but the short story is a
frantic tale
of five states and thirty moves
that ended when I jumped out of
the caravan called family
on the banks of the Columbia River
with a dual-trigger bass trombone
in my hand.

The plan was simple:
take the ninety bucks from
graduation
and buy a one-way ticket to Boston
to become a jazz musician.

It was a red eye out of Seattle --
My first flight,
lifting above the lights
and mountains
and nomads
without faces
and homes
and purpose,

on the other side of midnight.

Stowaway In Boston
josjr (2012 1001)