(For Amiri, Billie & Ella Nem)
1.
blues is black folks’ literature
memory stored on a pentatonic
scale. cultural philosophy distilled
in song. the low end theory
black thought embodied in body
talk like james brown’s camel walk
the cakewalk & crip walk
slow drag rhythm & holy profane
the shimmy shake whipped to a jelly
cold duck & hucklebuck; the dog
catcher. or take the moonwalk
black down memory lane: bill bailey
bopped the backslide in dope stage exits—
a decade before the king of pop
was born & vertamae grosvenor
space walked into the future
of a three-sided dream
astral traveling through galaxies
on a sun ship w/ sun ra
when michael jackson played bongos
on a oatmeal box in gary
2.
blues lingo: a tale told in pitch
swivel hips & harmonies
historiography versed in vamps
runs in e flat; lexicon like dogon
the funky frequencies of falsetto
imagine five generations crammed
into a bassline. tone colors like bright
mississippi encircled inside golden bells
of a horn; talkbox or the kansas city
two-step. roughneck rhythms in a riff
jumping at the woodside
like jitterbugs & confirmation
configurations of black soundscapes
sampled from half-notes & 5/4 themes
fine & mellow as billie holiday’s white gardenia
yet tragic as a heroin needle
holiday’s life was a broken blues record
her voice scarred like six strings
of a bottleneck guitar; twelve bars
of pain—picked & strummed
over misogyny & bruises
in the land of jim crow
3.
blues sang,
good morning heartache
here we go again
at the savoy ballroom
battle of the bands in 1937
the lindy hoppers spinning like tops
jamming in mid-air
like a ella fitzgerald scat solo
she’s singing to beat the band
a blues chorus of staccato swing
vocal percussion of old school
freestyle straight, no chaser
right off the top of the dome
a rhyme scheme of dance moves
written inside a drum
like a wang dang doodle
all night long.
