Pop in a Bebop cassette. Press “fast and solo.” My eyes rolling back in a trance. Older Matthew (my high school girlfriend’s brother) telling younger Matthew (me) to read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and listen to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie’s “Salt Peanuts, Salt Peanuts, Salt Peanuts.” Now, I’m actually a poet on the road, with Warren, who says, “Miles’ smiles will cut you.” To be virtuosos of non-violent masculinity, word wizzes, we scan the American scene for racial markers while whetting our ancestral Sharpies. Postmodernity, afterhours, playing Blackout poetry on a blues harp in the Playboy Mansion. As they say, players gonna play. Half a century later, tap-tap-tapping the keyboard keys, re-arranging hand-me-downs, banging out jazz puns and jazz metaphors for an audience of white clappers. Sounds like, sounds like, found money. But he’s chord-changing, now, contrapuntally, between the one who died of righteous anger, and the one who lived with righteous joy. Bird/Diz by Warren C. Longmire (BUNNY, an imprint of Fonograf Editions, 2022).
