Bird

Your geometry stands, backlit
on the stage in my head
cool as a double Brando on the rocks
waist-high in the blue miasma
of woody cigarettes and Chanel No. 5

Lazy-lidded kittens feed their
juniper smiles to
the hungry haberdashed
while on a great, golden fish
you spin out a bop cadenza
clicking down on it’s scales
slick as wet glass,
slick as jazz kitten lips

dancers clutch in an
off-center sway, punch-drunk
on the precipice of some imagined rhythm
only you can understand.
Each note, an envelope carrying the
whiskey-soured truths of this and
every charged darkness:
Sartre spasms and Nietzche nodules,
but touting love and nihilism
with equal fervor;
your very breath transmogrified
to liquid longing or pain

Standing there with your
major seventh fermata, long and sad,
the boys close the B flat novel of a
necromantic Harlem Nocturne.
Pushing through your cool-as-December,
a molten diamond breaks the blue-black
surface of your brow,
rolls down, running for its life
to splash-fracture on the stage

chasing the notes, the truths
that birthed it like mother