Wednesday, 4 December 2024

Five Poems by Connie Johnson

 




Spilt Ink  


 

I pick up a pen 

I let your love guide 

my hand 

 

What you told me 

this morning is worth 

preserving   

 

What you told me 

in between cigarettes 

is the poetry that 

writes itself  

 

spirits improvising  

in between the lines 

 

secrets 

told freely  

even if they’re  

only for an  

audience  

of one 

 

 

 

 

My Latest Description of Us 

 

 

Your eyes are perplexed, forgive me when I say  

there is jazz in everything that you do. Our mingling  

of souls and energy, there is an undercurrent  

 

of harmonic complexities in everything that we say.  

I can’t believe you don’t feel it! I am the breath of your  

repertoire, the moonlit stars on the tip of your  

 

tongue. All of our punctuations…swinging!  

You encompass all of the idioms that describe us.  

We stride, we transition into bebop. (Are you telling 

 

me you don’t feel that?) A jazz staccato of all  

understanding, it’s a mournful languagebut why  

try to muzzle me now?  

 

You are my jazz personified  

and I’m forever high as you  

follow me like the moon. 

 

 

 

 

I Am Amber Beads Sold in Jackson Square 


 

Brazen, wildflowers and birds  

And I ask         how shall I see you  

                        thru my tears 

 

We are atoms of lust and subtle aftermath  

of understanding, and I’m no scientist.  

 

I am the beads that adorn your throat and wrists;  

I am the murmur of faith and all that is predestined. 

   

I want to be more than just a barren notion of love  

and a wasted aesthetic. You are a phantom of time  

 

that wanders Jackson Square and I remain  

haunted. Rainswept! A spiral of stars and  

weightlessness. 

 

And I am the one  

who sings         how shall I see you  

                        thru my tears? 

 

 

 

 

Blues Medicine 


 

I thought if I put on some Sun House I’d feel better,  

this version of a blues cure being unmistakable.  

Now I only feel worse, tattered sunflowers  

bursting forth from my Victrola, uninvited guests  

with their whims and appetites.  

 

Black and shiny grooves, this is where certain roads  

take you because the blues can’t cure everything.  

 

All of these jagged notes are self-inflicted.  

 

blues scrawl of understanding 

traces of a Mississippi mugshot  

 

And this is what I know for fact:  

the same Sun House who tried to make me  

his black-eyed Susan is the same man  

who wears my heart on his sleeve. 

 

 

 

 

What I Interpreted 

 

 

Emblem of the blues  

sweetening of time and legacy  

the quasi-bebop of your smile  

and your stance  

 

I knew I was going to like you  

when I met you: purely personal  

roots of understanding  / what you offer  

in your hand is pages ripped from  

a lyric sheet  

 

a reflex of survival / blues epithet! 

I need a photo of us as we step off your tour bus 

vintage salvation / sepia tones / a remembrance  

of the night you were born in Columbus, GA  

 

memorized lyrics 

undulating /  jazzy precision  

floating in blues / drowning  

in bass notes and fluency  

 

I speak your language  

you’re everything I was brought  

to the world to say









Connie Johnson is a Los Angeles, CA-based Pushcart Prize nominee whose poetry has appeared in San Pedro River Review, Syncopation Literary Journal, Cholla Needles, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Voicemail Poems, Toasted Cheese, Impspired, Hudson Valley Writers Guild,  The Rye Whiskey Review,    and Writing in a Woman’s Voice. Everything is Distant Now (Blue Horse Press), her debut poetry collection, is available on Amazon; In a Place of Dreams, her digital album/chapbook, can be found at www.jerryjazzmusician.com

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Five Poems by Connie Johnson

  Spilt Ink      I pick up a pen   I let your love guide   my hand     What you told me   this morning is worth   preserving        What y...