Walking Parker Home

Sweet beats of jazz impaled on slivers of wind

Kansas Black Morning/ First Horn Eyes/

Historical sound pictures on New Bird wings

People shouts/ boy alto dream/ Tomorrow’s 

Gold belled pipe of stops and future Blues Times

Lurking Hawkins/ shadows of Lester/ realization

Bronze fingers—brain extensions seeking trapped sounds

Ghetto thoughts/ bandstand courage/ solo flight

Nerve-wracked suspicions of newer songs and doubts

New York altar city/ black tears/ secret disciples

Hammer horn pounding soul marks on unswinging gates

Culture gods/ mob sounds/ visions of spikes

Panic excursions to tribal Jazz wombs and transfusions

Heroin nights of birth/ and soaring/ over boppy new ground.

Smothered rage covering pyramids of notes spontaneously exploding

Cool revelations/ shrill hopes/ beauty spread into greedy ears

Birdland nights on bop mountains, windy saxophone revolutions

Dayrooms of junk/ and melting walls and circling vultures/

Money cancer/ remembered pain/ terror flights/

Death and indestructible existence

In that Jazz corner of life

Wrapped in a mist of sound

His legacy, our Jazz-tinted dawn

Wailing his triumphs of oddly begotten dreams

Inviting the nerveless to feel once more

That fierce dying of humans consumed

In raging fires of Love.