Jazz Poetry

The piano takes over,
he knows he’s good, the flashy star,
the one who can play ten-note chords,
eleven if you count the player’s nose.
Notes fly around the room,
their ephemeral flash dependant on the moment,
instantly discarded for the next generation.

The drummer picks up tempo amidst audience applause,
a jack-in-the-box spastic flurry coming from a quiet beat.
Everyone tenses, but the episode subsides, a wave that overreached.
The trumpets muzzle themselves and blare out their duet,
gathering hither and flying yonder but always somehow seeming to mingle around the bass harmony,
moths who instinctively know where the light is.

The tenor sax is much too elegant to be a moth.
A sensuous riff sends a shudder through the room and skin tingles.
Drifting motes of dust meet drifting notes of lust
as the siren dances hypnotically forever beyond reach,
throwing off momentary honey-drops of sound to complete the spell.

Dissonance, and a gasp as it resolves itself,
clearly it was going to that other chord all along.
The tune wanders randomly in and out,
crazy circles and whirles and curls trilling and thrilling and chilling,
fizzy and dizzy, crazy and hazy,
filling the air with sparkles of radiant rainbow sound
as it threads through a maze of its own making
taking one of the infinite number of paths to its destination
and never to return.