A Love Supreme
Wearing dark shades
on a smoky, nightclub stage
American Zen blows screaming notes
through a tenor sax
risking cacophony and chaos
on its quest for transcendence.
The Buddha’s teaching came with a wagesa,
a strip of cloth resembling a saxophone strap
worn around the neck. McCoy Tyner on piano,
Jimmy Garrison on string bass, Elvin Jones on drums,
and a community of bodhisattvas
have accompanied me ever since.
Zen in America is not
a straight-jacket symphony of koto and shamisen.
It’s free-form, spontaneous, always evolving.
Swing, bebop, cool jazz, free jazz, Dixieland,
jazz fusion, jazz rock, Latin jazz, punk jazz, jazz hip-hop
whatever you play extemporize on chords,
add dissonance, experiment with Afro-Cuban rhythm
and pentatonic scales, push boundaries,
all while maintaining an exquisite harmony
with other musicians. Improvise on the theme.
Make it your own
The Marriage of Emptiness and Karma
No one knows why they’re together.
Emptiness is a veteran of the rave scene.
Her strobe-lit, face flushed with Ecstasy
hop/stomping to the techno beat.
Her hobbies include dwarf tossing,
demolition, and recreational nuclear physics.
She keeps an Uzi in the medicine cabinet
next to the amyl nitrate. When faced with a choice,
she asks, “What would a mad scientist do?”
He’s a white-shirt Rotarian
who entered accounting before it was cool.
Life insurance, disability, college savings fund, 401(k)
Dockers and golf shirts, oil change every 3,000 miles
Medical, dental, 2 weeks paid vacation
Karma never takes the standard deduction.
He eats steamed veggies. She smothers
wild boar with Carolina Reapers
until tears, runny nose, and blurred vision
make all worlds one.
When ten oxen followed her home,
some with bloody noses,
some who could roll over and fetch,
and some who weren’t there at all,
she asked, “Can I keep ‘em?”
Knowing he’d be stuck cleaning up the mess,
Karma refused.
As Emptiness looked at the strays,
a tear rolled down her cheek.
“All these years
I thought I was living with abandon
but I was as deluded as a deaf mute
cheering at a Nickelback concert.”
Isaac Newton’s Trickster
Coyote in the orbits
Raven in the equations
Four Earths whirligig
not in a waltz
but in a slam dance.
The N-body problem slingshots
Earths out of orbit
to careen through the galaxy
Fire Season Runs From September Through August
Seductive as a warm bath, the Santa Ana wind
infiltrates my screen door. I smell campfires.
Soon, ash falls like fluffy snowflakes.
Everyone east of I-5 evacuates
to the racetrack. A nurse
camps in my living room,
leaves a used hypodermic in the trash.
“No way I’m abandoning my home,”
Jim says at work. He’s a good teammate,
former marine, pulls his weight, courtly manners.
Once, wildfires only came in October. Now,
walls of smoke rise from blazing hills even in May.
Still, wooden-shake roofs sprout like poison oak.
“You’ll never convince me climate change is real,”
Jim says. “No way people could produce that much CO2!”
I take out a pen and some assumptions,
calculate cars and industry add one percent
to the atmosphere per year, significant
after decades but Jim’s right.
I’ll never convince him.
Elephant Bookmark
Jon Wesick - Hundreds of Jon Wesick’s poems and stories have appeared in journals such as the I-70 Review, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, New Verse News, Paterson Literary Review, and Unlikely Stories. He is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual and host of the Gelato East Fiction Open Mic as well as the NAV Arts poetry reading. His latest short story collection is Reductio Ad Absurdum. He lives in Manchester, New Hampshire and longs for gene editing to bring giant wombats back from extinction. http://jonwesick.com
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