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 language…but 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