By Julien Edmund Moss
Systosomatic
Like myself in another life
I am one soul, one love, one life
I could compose a thousand lines of vomit
I am a schismatic
And I recalled that from a different state
My semipermadrunk mind the more plastic
More pliant than before
Those three jazz ghosts
Mortent aux 60’s
And the three Kings
(Pale infidel like me)
The ghosts played of a “free” movement
While the Kings brought of a style from bondage
To elaborate, a kid, a reedsman, and a gestalt
To elucidate, Blues Boy, Southpaw, and Let It Roll
Forget the poetics of Apollo among literary circles
Give yourself instead to the Birdolotry of jazz squares
Holla: For the Bard would have loved the Bird
Lest we forget the copyjobs of dead slingers
Don’t forget those who took up
The tenor in recompense to a rhapsode
You was a God, you remember
Your improvisation was supreme
But I’d want to walk with the composers
The Duke to the Monk to the Ming(us)
But somehow I could never just get there
I never had the conception to do that
Clutching at Straws 