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Hear the author read with jazz accompaniment!1 4.7 megs
Growing up against the rutty grain, dirty dishwater in gray veins, the litter’s puny runt blew a gutter grunt, knew luck’s bittersweet ball was gettin’ born at all, head poppin’ out of mommy’s ju-ju shrine as parade bands walked on the wah wah peddlin’ a salty second line: all humankind shall be metal-twined until the key of sea shall free them.
Growing up against nutty Neptune’s reign, the runt covered not the waterfront but the clubs it spewed up & maintained. While women worked that walk, rivers saved their sediment for the sea & he wailed on that trail a beach full of blues in perpetuity. Embouchure so strong, Orpheus slay with a song of long notes, a killer of ladies morphing into a phraser of praises!
Growing up amidst rugged mugs motley mean, he didn’t mind the underground scene for no matter how deep he dug into the Pleistocene, up came heavy metal to melt down & play: a silver flute, a Harmon mute, Adolph Sax’s gold suit shining. When storm shouts broke with morning, whatever was buried six feet under found its way to what was called the Long Island Sound. On the third day, according to the G-men, Orpheus ascended & a joyous noise arose on a bridge in Brooklyn, sky so warm after the rain, Sonny, only a hint winter had ever been. Helios shone bright diagonals across oily avenues & spring rolled in, the here-we-go-again that shaped him a felon in his unknown skin, seeking his Eurydice.
Growing up at his arrest for no address & alleged lunar howling his horn runneth over like a soul in lungful wonder. He stood alone in a twilit zone playin’ a gut-bucket vamp that had the courtroom comin’ undone in fits what got him a witness, notes so low-down & mean folks tore out their hair & screamed. A mob of maenads lunged toward him & he knew for certain, as only drowning men could see him, that his is the ocean, songs but bits of he the key of sea shall free. He eyed in the gallery his Eurydice & the spinning of big wheels in the town of Ezekiel proved to be nothing next to her beauty. Danglin’ on the hangin’ tree, he made to spring a blood red toast for what can really hang you up the most.2
Production Notes:
1 The musical track features Claire Daly on baritone sax, Dave Hofstra on bass, Warren I. Smith on drums, and Eli Yamin on piano.2 This version of Origins in the Key of Sea is excerpted from A Further Being, available from Leaping Dog Press. A longer version of Origins in the Key of Sea can be read here at Unlikely.
Kirpal Gordon was the musical director at Unlikely 2.0 in 2006.