jazz

The garage lights, foggy & dust-licked

Culling even more of my superfluous belongings, I have saved a few bits from my old notes from my MFA studies. I’ll share them here, a select few, before recycling. The following is an in-class exercise, of which the phrase in this blog post title is the prompt. If you know about writing, you’ll recognize the poetic form.


…late at night, after many margaritas (the kind they stop you after three), tottering to friend’s car, talking about love, war, or (more likely) sex, we enter.

going to friend’s car, we enter, a large parking garage, the kind that makes all women think of attacks, that make me in particular think of those action scenes in movies: car squealings, gun ricochet off paint, hiding between BMWs with a magic sword.

Power in two–not nervous like alone. The place itself is alone. And there, a sound. –Under the lone lights, stained with time and piss, he leans, jazz man.

Jazz man leans in that way on the cement wall. His sax softens it. He doesn’t look like anybody in particular–no more frightening or more beautiful than anyone. Ordinary–yet his sax softens cement.

We stop.

Not going home, yet. Friend lights cigarette. Not going home yet. Stay a while. Learn to listen. No hat, so no pay. No deal, no bargains. Only music. Only echoes subterranean. Ricochet off paint, moths tick, a syncopated metronome. Music.