Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
Feb 2020
there should be easier ways to buy jazz records...
perhaps i should be more familiar
with black literature... perhaps will alexander
is not enough... oh god: i just stepped into
a reverse psychology faux pas...

  again...

there should be easier ways to buy jazz records...
but clearly there aren't...
for years and years i sat on the tube as it rolled
between leytonstone and leyton...
they now have a grand mount... for the new graves...
prior to... the graveyard stretched...
almost the entire distance from one station
of the central line to the next...

i did plan to go into london before
lying myself to sleep... once upon a time i would
go all the way... into tourist central...
i'd go and do the usual... tate modern...
tate national...
i even dressed myself for the occassion...
well... "dressed"...
does a dog change its fur...
i had to capture the sensation of wearing
the same clothes for long enough...
washing, personal hygiene -
change of t-shirts... of course...
but today i was going to buy myself some
jazz records...

i couldn't just hop on the bus (when was
the last time i used a bus -
rather the centipede of my own legs?
you never forget to swim or ride a bicycle -
when was the the last time
i used the tube?) -  and just head to the shop...

that would be so boring...
and i'm not a female to window-shop either...
what ensured a diversion?
immaculate timing...
   walking up to the bus stop...
a girl... probably 16... sitting and waiting...
bus pulls up... i gesticulate: ladies first...
and she gives me a smile...

that decided... winter! it's winter!
and Freya's daughter took a needle's eye
and brought me before the altar of my original
whim...
jumped on the 66 bus and then on
the central line... newbury park,
gants hill, redbridge, wanstead,
leytonstone... leyton... and onto st. patrick's
roman catholic cemetary...

just before spring comes...
to find the absolute nadir of winter -
perhaps autumn is when romance novels
are written about death...
but i much prefer graveyard in winter...
i would have gone further into london:
but those jazz vinyls are not going
to buy themselves...
plus... i find graveyards... well...
hardly morbid... i like them because...
esp. the roman catholic ones...
have statues... and...
well... who wouldn't want to see
a museum of statues: al fresco!

reiteration - because i can't mumble
or metaphor myself or make this succinct...
graveyards are museums al fresco...
whoever was the sculptor... of the crude stone...
the second artist... the weatherer has also
done his bit... coy wind... a splattering
of "paint" with rain...
the... basking in the sun...
the drop in temperature...
i like to see the "other" artist at work...
give me this one life's span a peek into
the deeds of this almost eternal sculpture
baron...

whether god or: death personified...
               the theological god can return to his
origins story... the sun the moon the stars
the: what came first the chicken or the egg...
what came first... the spiderweb or the spider?
pointless hamsterwheel questions:
a priori this... a posteriori that...
museums are stuffy... they might hold
under their roof... in pristine vacuum...
the Elgin marbles... but i want to visit a museum
that breathes! these gravestone statues...
breathe! if you're not careful enough...
you might see a wandering eye...
as if someone transcendent has touched them...

graveyards: museums al fresco...
and in winter? and it's your typical sodden...
overcast... london clepsydra of drool and dire
and the scent of wet dog fair...
and there is no chance to intoxicate yourself
with the decomposition of autumn's fall:
banquet of leaves... and that sickly sweet
botanical scent of decay...
it's winter and raindrops become piercing
needles of sensation...
you wouldn't even dare... to blink.
                    
- of course i had to take a few photographs...
it would be weird if i didn't...
once upon a time even death was due
man's concern for beauty...
in these grave statues... whether it's a 1000th
jesus or some obscure saint...
whatever it was... it was certainly worth...
imitating a ******... getting all wet with
goosebumps on the ******* sack tickling you...
no hard-on... whenever you'd want
to gasp and spew some variation whale
sonar: morse onomatopoeia: coy cooing an ooh...

so back on the tube and to the record store...
****... need to ****...
to the pub and half a pint of guinness...
again: a woman's smile is so up-lifting...
and that surprise as you're only there for half
a pint... up the stairs to the toilet and...
out the pub...

the thing about buying jazz records...
why would i buy a gramaphone...
if i didn't intend to only buy jazz records for it?
why buy, modern vinyl?
the thing about buying jazz records...
you need to know a few names...
you always look at the... "starring"...
i know there's another term for what i'm
looking for... "starring" is easy...
and it's in no way related to the word:
repetroire... but it is french etymologically:
although mutated from: ensemble...

i'm pretty sure there is an english equivalent
to ensemble: which is not "starring"...
accompanied by...
                 that sort of mid-way introductory
statement by the vocalist...
on the piano we have...
on the guitar we have... and each band member
does a little accent impromptu:
accent impromptu: which is not a full-on
hair-metal solo 2 hour slow bbq **** chicken
strutting send-off into the stratosphere...

never mind... can't a white guy just appreciate
jazz... i'm tired of the sycophants of classical music...
including charles bukowski...
the japanese have covered this sycophancy
and elevated it to virtuosity of the drum-kit
monkey... fair play...
but jazz never allows you to... over-think...
anything... a head without thought
and all that sea of feel...
logic is over-rated... i like my cushion of
the antithesis of descartes: res cogitans in that
i find pleasure... in res vanus...
- and classical music is over-thought...
to me at least... it's a falling piano of notes
and no breather... no feel for bass drums or pause...
for an accent of sorts...
no real idiosyncracy - beside the idiosyncracy
of the oeuvre...

jazz says to me: i don't want to over-think:
not-thinking...
it's as simple as that... i hardly think a cat
allows that onomatopoeia: meow...
i hardly think a dog allows that onomatopoeia:
bark / woof... to enter and govern his mind...
this imitation of being: surrounded
by beings with complex prompts and
a car-wreck of sounding verbiage...
hardly a woof or a meow to be "deconstructed"
in those furry-heads of theirs...
how does a sax sound in my head...
when i can't hear a sax outside of it...
i'm not a composer... letters would congest
the sponge... soapy water instead
of live-young evian... pristine cool and crisp...

drums and all their ambience...
when there's the intro by the horn...
before the protagonist sax takes over...
sly little horn...
jazz... i don't like to over-think not-thinking...
classical music?
i tend to over-think not-thinking...
with jazz i can never over-think not-thinking...
because: feelz... and what-not...
it's hardly an armchair of apathy...
it's hardly a sofa of tolerance...
it's a cushion for a head that sometimes
feels like a tonne of lead...
and the air doesn't become water: "magically"
to even wish for a sinking sensation...
blurps of bubbles no...
there's only the almighty fall or an explosion...

feelz... (this will be addressed...
the Z... in german... that i do promise...)

- again, not again, again... i can't buy the same old
stale **** narrative behind the slave trade...
there's a jack of spades in here somewhere...
no blacks in h'america: no jazz...
it's that simple... god forbid where i'd be at if
i were to still praise the suffocating confines
of classical music...
this is classical music to me...
this is... everything that's suffocating about
Bach's innovative polyphony...
polyphony sure... but what jazz allows and
what classical music doesn't...
it's hardly called a solo if only the piano gets
it... a chopin or a liszt...
any... famous violinists sharing the stage
with the pianists... the piano is the only instrument
that's allowed a solo: proper...
but in jazz... you can get all the instruments
in the ensemble given a fair share...
no africans coming over to h'america...
no jazz... instead:
       pirouettes in corsets and crinolines!
ugh...
               liberated into: chain-smoking
and giggling why pulling an imaginary chain
saying: choo! choo! this train has nowhere
to stop... beside a tomorrow...
and should tomorrow come...
                                      that's still only a gamble!

jazz because there is no singing...
            well... 'my funny valentine'... chet baker...
better known on screen as ethan hawke...
astronaut... thespian... at large chameleon...
dat dere: the disappointment from
having chamelon leather shoes...
that will riddle... should ever a pair be made...
no fluorescence no change in the weather...
just at the time of the killing...
would the pigment remain: "thus desired"?
well... i don't know what the muslims
and the yids have against pork...
i'm pretty sure most standards of belts
and shoes are... made from pork skin...
which is... well... leather...
perhaps they should don the orthodox ***
yom kippur statement of running
into the synagogue wearing sneakers!

just saying... porky pink and whitey sneaked
in with a guitar and a piano...
sonny clark also tip-toed on the black
and white cascade...
                                  interludes from absence...
or the myth of the custard -
               it boils like a voice unearthed from
mud... tinged with surprises of a canary...
gloating glutton of the stove...
               jazz in the kitchen,
jazz in the bedroom... jazz in the living room...
jazz sitting up, jazz sitting down,
jazz drinking a hop-heavy lager...
jazz sober...
                                        it's not jazz:
because i live in new york and i have a feel
for the romance with frank o'hara and all things
gay and otherwise cosmopolitan...
romford is probably like hull...
and i'm the antithesis of phil larkin...
my verse is more scribbles and scrabble than
his neat: your parents ****** you...

jazz is a rebellion akin to 'my parents ****** me'
when they fed me a classical music diet
as a child... rock guns 'n' roses grunge and punk
were minor rebellions: teasing pop...
but nothing to match to the diet of classical music
ingested early on in life...
                          jazz was and is, though...

- when buy a jazz record... you have to look for
the usual suspects...
sometimes you look what the lead protagonist
is playing... after hearing Grachan Moncur III's
avant-garde... i'm not convinced...
but there is a list of the usual suspects...
evolution just reminded me of everything
i didn't like about eric dolphy's out to lunch...
but there's a list of usual suspects...

'i can't believe i almost bought a vinyl of a c.d.
i already own... money jungle by duke ellington...
good that i didn't...'

the usual suspects of an ensemble alternating:
eric dolphy, paul chambers, freddie hubbard,
sonny clark, joe chambers, herbie hancock,
john coltraine, sonny rollins, kenny burnell,
art blakey...            wayne shorter...
what would probably become equivalent to...
sitting through a ****** movie...
but otherwise finding the end-credits more
entertaining... the ******-movie of what's not
remembered as that golden fleece of mid-20th
century nostalgia...
i once placed my nostalgia in h'american
hippy culture... come to think of it...
i guess my nostalgia is: the coming out of
1950s america and no quiet going the full mile
into beatnik poetry recitations with jazz
in the background...
no one would **** the poets:
instead the jazz musicians...
                     somewhere cowering under
an umbrella sown together from moth wings...
assuring himself a lightbulb was
the sun... evidently no formality of language
genesis: dear sir / madam
exodus: yours sincerely / yours faithfully...
and all of this... in between?

                         shoes shoes...
two jazz records is hardly an extravagance...
these days...
oliver nelson - the blues and the abstract truth...
sonny rollins - the bridge (jim hall on guitar)...
well... because sonny rollins and: colossus...
24 quid...
                why am i supposed to remember
the slave trade... am i a native of these parts?
i thought i was the "dumb ******" industrial n-----
joke? don't shoot the messanger...
do i look like i've just killed your grandma'
by playing a ******* harmonica?
not everyone is going to be listening to rap...
what jazz gave rap... isn't gonna give
that easily for me to ingest... *****-nilly...
sonny rollins... looks like a well attired man...
even if it is 1963... perhaps my own ambitions are lax...
i'm the son that wouldn't become
his father... and he was always the son
that was going to overshadow his father...
and that leaves me with my paternal grandfather...
all that remains to be said...
by my maternal grandfather: we has a hard worker...
well... stick that as an epitaph for
anyone without an epitaph on their grave...
i'm sure those dates will look like
candy dripping from a ******* rainbow
any day soon!

thighs, legs in total, comic sanskirt of the brains
between the gallows of *******....
and hands: all those geisha hands...
are the erotica canvas for my no-thrills
genocide *****-and-tic canvas work of a tissue...
because... even if i "cant get any"...
any is just as plenty...
i shared a moment in a supermarket with
a guy who was buying...
wine and bread... honest to god...
he was buying wine and bread...
i missed the last supper and that magic
of a philosopher's stone of:
the wood of all metaphors...
that great driftwood of history...
the postage stamp of contemp. african
get-togethers in europe...

                       an eric dolphy or an bobby hutcherson
on cymbals... "vibes"
   ("vibes" could also be made synonymous
with a prog rock artifact...
a Hammond E-112 ***** too)
                            could work...
the cymbals or the xylophone or whatever
that elevator muzak attache is...
could work... in synch...
on something like grant green's idle moments...
as forrest gump would have said it...
the gi(t)ar is in symbiosis...
but please no horns no sax...
well... sax ever so slightly...
just below the drums...
most certainly beneath the bass...
keep it clean with the guitar and the piano...
only then... some sort of equilibrium...

otherwise what's 120 quid?
something my hands can touch and the sort
of money that i would never spend:
how much vinyl can a man eat
before he realises... this **** isn't liquorice!
from pocket to pocket...
from hand to hand...
                  i never gave that money 10 quid
short with a box of chocolates or a bunch
of flowers... so i guess...
that's money best swept under the rug
of daily needs... flowers wither and chocolate...
eh... chocolate...
                                it's not the thought
of liquorice when playing a vinyl record on
a gramophone... anise amber anise amber anise...
cinnamon and...
and and and and... the raven hair of
bulgarian prostitutes... fingertips...
if only the tongue could read braille...

       i'd ensure that if i went into a brothel
i'd spend a good ten minutes moving my fingertips
ferocious against a brickwall...
some might say: i wanted to experience
of feeling oysters under my fingertips...
when caressing the otherwise sandpaper of skin...
and time...

beer becomes an elevated circumstance
of some leftover whiskey...
and this... cameo cinema of my memories...
yes... rubbing my fingertips against
a brickwall... before walking into
a brothel...

- the germans have been lying!
they have another "secret" letter in their arsenal...
although they will not outright admit it!
perhaps the ß (eszet) is interchangeable in
younger brother ßaß (saxon) english...
surprise: surpriße!
                
             most of the arabs flock around
the nationalflaggehandelsflaggeparteiflagge...

perhaps there was an S-to-Z-to-S-to-Z
interchange bound to the ß...
aber...

wo alle straßen enden...
                     hört unser weg nicht auf,
wohin wir uns auch wenden,
die Zeit nimmt ihren lauf...

         yep... that german "z"... which is more like...
a "russian" c... a ****** c... most certainly
a wet snare sizzle of... a ... Ц...

   das herц, verbrannt...
                   im schmerц, verbannt...
so цiehen wir verloren durch gas graue
niemandsland.

              then again... that all depends which german
dialect you're talking about...
and that russian spy ц is most certainly missing
upon a: schwarzdeutsche
             richtigerdepflugdeutsche rendition of:
zu...

and that's the compensation dynamic...
i'll reach into the zenith of jazz...
but come into the nadir of german army songs...
i'll squeeze a horn but then
come and drop a stone dipped in honey
into a hornet's nest...

              perhaps i haven't been the best
tourist when it comes to the concentration camps...
but i have visited the mass graves of the germans
from the first world war around Ypres...
and i have been to the graveyards of the allies...
a sparrow or a robin always seems
to sing each individual german soldier's lot
in the graveyards of the sleeping en masse...
the silence always breaks...
seeing how they were piled up...
                 compared to the individual graves
of the allied soldiers?
it's almost like going to see the end product
of the contracetion camps...
              a heap of bodies readied for a mass grave...

let's not riddle a liking for folk songs into this...
folk songs are non-negotiable details in all of this...
a black man can call another black man
a n-----... well...
i might as well call another white man...
carelessly and with ridicule... a ****...
sorry... hehe... "oops"... a... naцi...
                                                                a нaци...
         beware the german Z given the ß und Ц...
eh... don't mind the S... it's hardly a caron (š) S...
you'd need to compound -sch- into the whole affair...
and still the east germans would write
ich... их... but... somehow make-out to say:
isch... iś... which is not a caron (š) S...
nor saшa...            it's... somewhere "in between":
                                 š   ś
                     via rammstein's ich will...
well... it's not french... so there's no grave S
          to compliment... so... das ist das... yener...
                    
so much for a friday night...
              before the altar of Moloch...
and his resurrection... busy body demon deity
of the abortion clinic...
and these are the old gods united
under the single Mammon facade of the semites...
Moloch is alive and well...
perhaps the babies sacrificed to him
are not still-born or otherwise...
perhaps the strain of the argument from
the conservatives whispered a retort for me
to utter: that each ******* if a microcosm
genocide... i will not utter the name...
call it an elevated sort of superstition...
or rather... i don't have to say the racial
slur... because... i'm pandering to
                                   porцellanmenшen -
that's two russians "spies" in already...
                                       regarding the иɐzᴉ...
at what point...
                                     under what authority...
it's a **** good metaphor though...
"metaphor"...
          that Moloch is awake once more...
as a deity in his own right -
no longer the "fallen angel" in the pantheon
of semitic gods brought to heed...
before ha-shem.
the
Mateuš Conrad
Written by
Mateuš Conrad  36/M/Essex (England)
(36/M/Essex (England))   
502
 
Please log in to view and add comments on poems