“broken embouchure” — a poem by M.T. Whitington

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Original painting of John Coltrane, courtesy Tim Hussey

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broken embouchure

warped certified gold hangs over the shoulder,
…………………………………blue on the wall,
……………..notes on Trane (Coltrane).
terse sayings run the lazy bird line,
…………………………….topping the vinyl list,
…………………..dripping sweet aphorisms
…………………………at the five spot.
life is short, art is long! clinging to the overture,
……………………..in eleven-dimensional drift,
…………………bubble notation
flows through the shape of the instrument,
……..as feathery as the legs of champagne
…………..rising to the surface, breaking.
……………………parse lingers vibrating the flesh.

blind fingers on the curvature,
-face up -trace up
………………….…end in a glass of broken embouchure.

contorted adinkras join in at the blue bottle,
………………………….twist a knife through the cheek
……………………………………….ragged petite fleur.
a yellow flower drops its petals
……………………….then turns into a spiky seed,
………………..variegated and sentimental.
settling down to meet up at forty-four,
…………………dueling a royal abstract truth overture
from the back of the house,
………………….subspace spitting seeds -bosonic -fermionic
…………………………in the prose of code.
…………..puckered up for the kiss,
tongue rolled handing it off to polyphonic,
……………….farkas blows to cool the soup.
the buzz began from one whom i shall not name,
…………………even and odd on the bars of a superstring.

blind fingers on the curvature,
-speed up -slow down
………………..…end in the sound of broken embouchure
little filaments play in the space
………………….genetically coded for symmetry,
…………………………………hit with a jazz break…
written in deep error correcting,
………………….humans must continue in the naming.
it from bits and black holes from wheeler,
………………….inception invented and discovered,
artifacts of cognition.
this could be unreasonable effectiveness…
…………………….because we are all born baffled.
stacked adinkras fall like tumblers in a lock.
……………….mountaintop of clarity
……………………………………tied to a rainforest of chaos,
listen for entanglement.
……..playing the jazz matrix past the overture,
……………………begging to become
……………………………..knowing heads
of the behavior of waves
……………..lusting after dumb luck, wasting in contrafact.
………………………..beings punch three quarks
embodied from the mouth of joyce
……………all play alongside tattoo marked flesh.

blind finger on the curvature
-speak up -downbeat
…end in the brass of broken embouchure

imagining knowledge alive
……………………….adrift without music
………………..in a desolate vacuum, lunar
totality must be impossible when every planet hums.
………………………….breaking through interstellar jupiter
each player plays a self-referencing piece,
………………begging to name beast after beast.
…………………………………the connoisseur
…………………..in a constant dialogue with nature,
……………….its patience
fresh from a blood moon
…………………………heading to crescent,
…………………………….spilling troubles like ancient punctuation,
falsifying the image resonance in a range of uncertainty,
………………….choosing to remain mute on things unmeasurable,
caught in the spin of transience,
…………………..adrift in the cure of the overture,
we saw what we looked for.
………………………encore binary code collapse
in four measures, three times
………………………drop head into triple tag put it to bed.

blind fingers on the curvature
-heavy -steady
-expanding -collapsing
……………………-drop flat
……………..…end in broken embouchure

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Click here to listen to Ms. Whitington read the poem

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M. T. Whitington hails from Memphis a force majeure. Blazing a trail through Los Angeles as other Southern writers in film and journalism, M. T. is a technomad focused on science, technology, nature, philosophy. A polemicist ruminating between lines with a clarion call and extreme unction.

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