At the Jazz Club

There is music seeping through the room, saturating
It can be seen in every moving thing
Like smoky wisps curling blue through the air
The drip of perspiration down the cocktail glasses
Wiped from the Jazz Man’s glistening brow.
I have seen people who can play music
With each note falling in its right place
To a rhythm flawlessly repeated indefinitely
A hitting of notes in cold, mathematical perfection.
Not tonight, tonight music is being made.
Something wholly unrepeatable is happening
Like a sprawling sunset, the dance of flame
Seen many times but never the same.
The sound is soaking into the living
And bringing the lifeless alive.
The Jazz Man is playing us like the song
Making us into the music, beating our hearts
Moving our feet, compelling our breath
Twisting and turning us in between tables
Projecting visions to our minds in color
Opening our mouths in whispers
Playing our fingers across the table tops
While blowing through her hair as a soft breeze
Falling soft across silken cream shoulders.
Parting thin lips as red as the dress
Stretched taut across my mind to the knee.
A Girl I Used to Know...
The girl I used to know...
Just some girl I used to know.

A Tangle - (J. Porter)

A Tangle

You point at two shadows, long in the evening decline and meshed like clouds, crossing out where we end and begin in an awkward and incomplete scene.

Written over and over by Shakespeare or Balzac, through centuries we've remained a tangle darkened by an ego, and when you turn your head to whisper about the past, you disappear, eclipsed by my lumbering frame with no definition but the absence of light.

Afraid to let yourself resurface, we slide deeper underneath the two shadows, under tar and gravel and clay – here in the heart's darkness, where no hand can reach out and squeeze another or press itself warmly into well-earned flesh and feel pulse.

But as the sunset quickens, our figures thin back to their solitary states, where each hand idly extends to hold its match in shadow, singing, our love was once an awkward and incomplete scene.

City Deer

city deer

the snapped twig was all it took,
sending the city deer scuttling down the hill
and you called over to see if i'd seen her,
so I walked over to where you were standing,
snapping more twigs with every step;
it was early spring and the ground was covered
in remnants of dead grass and Corona bottles.

we saw the deer cut a path further down
toward the railroad tracks until she disappeared.
the grey clouds sunk over the downtown skyline,
and the garbage reservoir rippled below,
little waves of poison reaching toward the city's center,
and as we stood there on the undeveloped plain
you asked me if i was getting sick of you yet.
how could i not say no?

Original 4/5/11

Revised 6/6/12 by J. Porter