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