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Spring Can Really Hang You up the Most
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, he covered not the waterfront but the clubs it spewed up & maintained. While women worked that walk, he saw why rivers save their sediment for the sea. He knew what wail to find on that trail: a beachful of blues in perpetuity. He slay with a long note, less a killer of ladies, more a phraser of praises. Raised up healthy & strong, his name became Orpheus.
Growing up amidst rugged mugs motley mean, he didn't mind the underground scene. He'd chant aloud his rain song, audience tranced in candle glow as the mead gourd poured & the hemp danced mellow slow & flowing stoutly. When storm shouts broke with morning, flood gates opened & 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, lifted a drain & a joyous noise arose on a bridge in Brooklyn, sky so gray round in April rain, only a hint winter had ever been. When sun shone bright diagonals across oily avenues, spring rolled in, Sonny, the here-we-go-again to loom a blossom from the bottom of that scrap heap & peat moss, shaping him a stranger in his own unknown skin.
Joy Spring
Growing up against the blind-lamed-gamed-&-pained, blowing solo against automaton grind came with the territory. But one midnight in May he wandered broken boulevards above ground beguiled, seeking his Eurydice. She appeared later. Meantime, popped for lunar howling & alleged vagrancy, handcuffed to a nick nack paddy wagon, brought to the Tombs, he lay buried behind bars, metal to metal, dirgin' a blues as myna as his key & canary fate. Court fathers pronounced his sentence A Song of Volga Boat Men, "Yo-ho-heave-ho, your mama buried you years ago." But Orpheus gave the dog a bone & this young horn man came rollin' home.
Growing up against witless misery's glinting rain, that rusty grit refusal, he'd played to a tee the fleeting part of the whole that wouldn't turn the wheel. On guard when, instead of belt buckle whelps, his parents whipped up a meal, he ate a Paschal lamb's Easter Sunday eucharist, roasted. "To grill again," they said, eye on the carving knife electric & toasted, "l'chaim."
Growing up against tin-eared blowhards slimly sane, relief came in metal's grinning facts, that no matter how far into earth he flung himself & dug, he came up with something to melt down & play, a shining gold suit, a sweet Harmon mute, a flute of silver armor, a bass horn of brass lining. So Orpheus lingered under street lamps pining for sound's ground down to dead night's click & derailler gear disappear, every man-made machine stopped & still. His eyes broke free with tears the same salt ratio as water in the mare & when he found the ocean alive within him, he grew human with a sound which awakened a maiden on a spring evening. Rising from her bed she ran to his manhole. He ushered her below the earth, past the dead & sleeping, stealing over what settled into his musical chamber as the love song of safe keeping.
Up Jumped Spring
Growing up against the slanting rain, life a lump in the throat bumping up against whatever tried to deny him, he flipped out when shouts from above ground came that his father had fallen into the sludge tank. He left Eurydice to fish out the remains. Round & round the wide rotunda tumbled, swill pumped out to unforgiving tides while grease & grime rose, skimmed into bins by arms long & metal. At the funeral, Orpheus blew a blues that had trees & priests weeping for gene pool renewal. Casket lowered, he chanted Adolph Sax's sea-song of return inevitable, root way down below.
Growing up against mainly slain disclaimers, questioning everything had been the answer, but Orpheo now played Oreo to a once-in-a-lifetime offer, dad's gig in the sewage plant. Whatever got caught in storm gates, oily caked coats of detritus ready to backlog, clung to grates, now ran easy. He could quell the maelstrom, spell the dead their rest with a wherewithal that sang them to freedom. Graveyard shift slimmed to a skeleton crew of one cornet for whatever notes water needed to leap from getting dammed, to keep the big wheels turning, proud Morpheo knew to do. But lost in heavy metal, turbines turning flotsam & jetsam turbulent, he watched love float into the fjords of anyone with embouchure to sing her beauty. From rotunda's tower he called, but still winds refused his tune.
It Might as Well Be Spring
Growing up against the slanted shanty's gluttonous gain, life rent inelegant gains from friction's fatal strain. Once combines choked, crusty grog song's motor grind halted. Pipes broke, water ways attacked moats by backing the bygone up onto Main Street. The whole town floated, then ran downhill in a hurry. To get it fixed, the part replaced, he sought the flywheels that had wound down to a hound's tooth. Instead he faced ingots' same steel beasts his misfit arms gripped long ago. Told by the salty D.A. not to look back or the lot of all he ever loved would be lost, Orpheus knew the day his mettle got tested had come.
Growing up at his arrest his horn runneth over like a soul in lungful wonder. He stood alone in a twilit zone beneath machinery's divinity & human hunger playin' a gut-bucket riff that had the courtroom comin' undone in fits what got him a witness, notes so angelic women tore out their hair & screamed. Finally the mob of maenads ran amok, lunged toward him, & as his clothes tore, he knew for certain, as only drowning men could see him, that Jesus was a sailor, songs but parts of he the key of sea shall free. When Orpheus lay down his flute mutely, he saw in the gallery his Eurydice & knew now the spin of big wheels in the town called Ezekiel was nothing next to her beauty.
Poet, fiction writer and literary consultant Kirpal Gordon has of late been writing spoken word solos for jazz music, playing & touring with Claire Daly. His thirty-year collection, Eros in Sanskrit, is due out this spring from Leaping Dog Press, along with Speak, Spake, Spoke, a jazz/poetry CD.