The Hooker Never Votes
Politics is a lonely horn
and sometimes I need a woman's
hand to make the pain go away.
Everybody wants something.
But what do I need?
What do I want?
I love the power of flesh
even if it comes with a price.
I'm a politician not a promise.
~
Water Song
Maybe we should eat our Lester Young.
The rivers around New York are filled
with the ancestors of sick fish I flushed
down the toilet when I was small.
Nothing swims upstream anymore,
there are too many musicians and hookers.
Fools keep being seduced by the sounds of war.
Fuck Peace!
Every woman has a tattoo above her butt and pond.
Even when Sarah Vaughn wasn't naked she could sing.
The war in Vietnam was going on around the time
I saw Jimi Hendrix with a gun in his hand.
After my first piano lesson I wanted to be Cecil Taylor.
My father said I looked more like Art Tatum then he did.
I made love to jazz after school without the safety of an ocean.
I was just learning how to swim.
One day they fished Albert Ayler
out of the river without his horn.
It was the first time I heard silence
and could imitate it.
~
2 Shorts and a Smoke
I.
Show me your hands
if you're not Art Tatum
Music keeps sitting
by my window
Somedays I just want jazz
to place her tongue in my ear
II.
1967
New York City
Vietnam War
protest
I bump into Paul
Simon without Garfunkel
The rest
is history
III.
Sarah Vaughn is a sweetheart
I'm too young to go steady
All the women I know
have the blues
I'm just a colored
man in love
