Originally posted on sciy.org by Rich Carlson on Sat 19 Apr 2008 10:27 AM PDT
Psalm for Coltrane
(imitation of 'Trane)
The Lord breathes through your ever changing manifestations
the life-world channeled through lightening arpeggios
fires inside synaptic passages of sound vibration
awakening consciousness from its empirical reflection,
synthesizing its grand panoramic vision
of self and the world and epistemologies of duality
through the sacrament of Jazz music
the imperishable oneness of soul-force utterance
a presence imparted to the initiate of 52nd St.
evolving through Dizzy, Bird, Monk, & Miles
to confound the platonic categories of harmony and scale,
the rejuvenation of time out of synch and disjointed from the post-war machine
and it's first technologies of pure genocide
skirting the cracked ash left behind in civilizations dialectic march
surviving the catastrophic bifurcation of the planetary juggernaut
as chaos gave way to bebop
in improvised wanderings leading into interstellar space
only to be sucked down through opiate wormhole
again under spell of gravity and race
the Zeitgeist crawling out through superstring syringe,
into the pulsed offering,
shuttering in the soot of the smelters
still gasping from cyanide chambers
your spirit rises through a virulent ether
entering passages charted by those first luminous jazz beings
attempting to shed the garment of the infinite
for the black carbon skin of the elemental
an immanence unknown to those transcendent brethren
who remain hidden in the shadows of angelic orders
they perish without trace in these worlds of spatial extension
while you ride in on riffs and ragas
the dust and broke bones of slaves
binding themselves taut with cut reed
Der Schrei, verarbeitet
into the sweltering forge of a Selmer
the graveyard cries of ancestors pressing into the flatted third of an Eb pentatonic
the exhilaration of freedom rising from a tenor
purusha’s sacrifice burning through the prakriti of night
upon a sun ship spiraling toward the stars
riffing through galaxies
aspiring for some promised Divinity
rich
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