Broadway, Nashville

You walk over the bridge, the silent playscape,
the red carpet someone pulled out from under you and left concrete.
Once you get to the other side you smell
the deep fry and sodium of music steaming off the city.
And you go in there and try to fan it all away
with your feet and voice and arms and guitar but no, it’s too many,
GI Joe has a guitar around his neck
that is no more than a gold chain, a tag.
It’s cleaner on the east side
where long haired bearded men flop out of their bare mattress
like it gave birth to them in underwear
and they fall in trash and punch their out of tune banjo
’til the strings sing together
and write a song for all the dead miners and rail road men.

Keep

New Orleans,
Keep nailing crushed beer cans to the soles of your Nike’s to make tap dancing shoes.
Keep dragging your box of change around the French Quarter dancing fast and bitterly.
Keep telling tourists, “You can’t drink all day if you don’t start in the morning”.
Keep making impromptu stages out of spray painted palettes.
Keep drumming your afro-pick against an empty Heineken bottle as you dance.
Keep smacking a tambourine against the neighbor lady’s bottom.
Neighbor lady, keep salsa dancing, keep smiling in your pretty red hand me down dress. It owes its beauty to you.
Keep old men in tennis-ball-walkers on the mic, shaking their baggy hips, scraping their feet.
New Orleans, keep singing through the hole in your teeth.

Keep your police doubled up atop giant horses, watching us finish warm whiskey from the label.
Keep boasting the pressed and folded garments of security,
The uniform is a brown bag over a beer can.
Keep police relaxed and smiling at Jazz Fest, at Tuba Fats park, joking, smoking with locals.
Keep  hipsters on skateboards being pulled by the leash of their pitbull into the darkness at the edge of Frenchman street.
Keep the handicap orbiting around the intersection in a Hoveround, dancing circles for the brass band.
Keep switching trolley track with a hot crow bar, impatient in the sun.
Keep fishing off the side of the levee for catfish, using spark plugs to weigh into the mud.

New Orleans, you keep trying to modernize
And hurricanes keep saying, ‘sit yo’ ass down, my baby,
You are a preserved moment in time,
I can’t just let you go on now.
God wasn’t gon’ make it easy for anybody that carry a torch.’
You are the keeper of an old light
Now kept young and lasting.
If we keep muddy enough
The rags that make up the frayed quilt of America
Can always be scrounged up from your puddles.

So, New Orleans,
Keep playing that ‘Big Fat Woman’.
You won’t always get half of what you put in.
Keep swerving your chrome cruiser bicycles apathetically down the wrong side of the street.
Keep your flowing oaks growing into porches and power lines.
Keep burning early morning torches for 6 a.m. saggy floorboard swing.
Keep your crawfish mountains high on a sheet of plywood, 1000 little red devils.
Keep telling people Tuba Fats blew his horn into the pregnant belly of Glen David Andrews’ mother and the next day Glen David Andrews was born.
New Orleans, keep playing your rusted bazooka,
Like it’s a shiny golden horn.

Mud (Jazz Fest 2013)

Sloshing through fields of cold coffee
I hear the rumor of the tuba,
I the swamp of the trombone,
The splash of the sax and
The trumpet’s river barge moan.

The pitter patter of drums
Is hard rain on a tin roof.
I realize how wet Jazz is.
How perfect.
The city below sea level,
The flooded, washed up city,
Sputtering and spawning that dilapidated, foamy sound,
Until it grows, bursting at the seems,
An ocean pressing against the levee,
Like lips against a mouth piece.

I slide my bare feet through the fair ground rain,
Kicking puddles,
Crashing water cymbals,
Dancing the roots of my heels into the soil.
The suction noise, as my foot farts out of the soft ground,
Is a loose lipped tuba lick.
I can play the splash of high hat puddles with one foot
And unplug the muddy tug-boat tuba with the other.
I can make broth and butter.
Bo Jarome Battle would call it
“Peaches and cream”.

The lips of the sky spit and buzz,
The cloud of Jazz seeps in slowly,
Now we’re floating in it.
The bog that divides each crowd in two
Leads to a single empty spot in the front row,
We are sailors of it.

Let Jazz come to you and hold you,
If you try to reach for it,
It spills instantly.
I walk out past the young sidewalk brass band
“Playing their hearts out harder than the guys inside,”
Twisting them out like wet rags.

My bare feet sting against the pavement.
Under a dripping canopy of palm trees I walk a mile back home.
There, I pull out a stiff chair,
The legs honk against the tile.
I sit, tambourine dishes rattle into a pile.
Bass runs across the floor.
Someone’s leftover cup from breakfast
Is on the table rippling.
One heavy shot,
And I drink the muddy water some more.

Vana Mazi

“Now we’re good and ripe,
Ripe for the picking
-The musical picking,
Ripe enough to be harvested”, I say.
“Ripe enough to be satisfied”, smiles Eric.
“Ripe enough to be consumed.”
In the cloudless Texas sky
The moon is another tall street lamp
And we’re ripe enough to be devoured whole
-To vanish before the sound.

The lead singer paces around the rosy antique stage
With bare arms in a silky black vest ,
A scally cap
And white winged sunglasses.
When the charged up gypsy dance rings out
He jumps his ripped toes a foot above the raising,
Bending his knees just enough
To keep his soles flat and together as they land.
Like his ragamuffin shoes the music bounces about
And stays level with tradition all at once.

The accordion player, in a transparent black dress
And high socks around her stocky legs,
Nurses the heavy weight of her black-child button box.
Moving her spider hand up and down the key bed,
She Burps the song baby,
Consoling the sharp firsts and fifths.
Her head reels around.
She sings high harmonies,
Chanting with the lead singer’s Irish tone, Indian trill,
Italian, Bulgarian and Haleem tongue.

The bassist, nodding in a red and blue flannel,
Shaggy brown hair and Aviators,
Toys with his u-bass.
The thick shiny rubber strings
Excite in wave form,
Undulate like little black snakes
Moving but not getting away.

The drummer melts into the sound,
Chopping long blocks of rhythm,
Channeling the bassist,
Charming the serpents, soft slingshots and live wires
Bouncing under his finger tips.

We leave with the violinist
Who removes her yellow 1950′s sunglasses for the last few numbers
Revealing her pained, solitary eyes
Which remain completely dissolved in the playing,
Totally composed, neutral and vacant
As she dices single notes into double rhythms,
Cuts up and down Spanish and Hungarian gypsy scales,
Racing indifferently.
Her lanky puppeteered arms,
Knit her instrument
Like a praying mantis rubbing her hands.
She stares cooly at the ground.
Her eyes are stern and yet somehow sensitive and exposed
Stone and alive,
Staring away from the stares upon them,
Unmoved
Except for the subtlest responses to the crowd
– A quick blush, a blink of nerves, a flash smile
And then her lashes fall again,
The music takes her under.
She resolves.
Her eyes breathe in deeply,
Quenched
And a quiet smile relaxes
Under her curly
Wheat
Sundown
Hair.

I slide off of my church pew seat,
Walk out of the general store venue that is the Whip In,
Pass between counters of candy, elixirs, cigars,
Beer taps and grocery style coolers.
Outside, I pace through picnic tables
Lined neatly under Christmas lights on a stone and gravel patio.
Ramshackle 2×4′s boarded up around the outside form a fence.
Ribbed metal industrial siding, fit for agriculture, patch the walls
Which are grounded in giant aluminum feeders,
Cacti budding out the sides.
All I can think about though is the electricity in the violinist’s graveyard eyes,
The lonely burning moon
And drinking from it all like a pig squeezing into his trough.

-Whip In, Austin, TX, 3/26/13