Walking Parker Home

By Bob Kaufman 1925–1986 Bob Kaufman

Sweet beats of jazz impaled on slivers of wind

Kansas Black Morning/ First Horn Eyes/

Historical sound pictures on New Bird wings

People shouts/ boy alto dreams/ Tomorrow’s

Gold belled pipe of stops and future Blues Times

Lurking Hawkins/ shadows of Lester/ realization

Bronze fingers—brain extensions seeking trapped sounds

Ghetto thoughts/ bandstand courage/ solo flight

Nerve-wracked suspicions of newer songs and doubts

New York alter city/ black tears/ secret disciples

Hammer horn pounding soul marks on unswinging gates

Culture gods/ mob sounds/ visions of spikes

Panic excursions to tribal Jazz wombs and transfusions

Heroin nights of birth/ and soaring/ over boppy new ground.

Smothered rage covering pyramids of notes spontaneously exploding

Cool revelations/ shrill hopes/ beauty speared into greedy ears

Birdland nights on bop mountains, windy saxophone revolutions.

Dayrooms of junk/ and melting walls and circling vultures/

Money cancer/ remembered pain/ terror flights/

Death and indestructible existence

In that Jazz corner of life

Wrapped in a mist of sound

His legacy, our Jazz-tinted dawn

Wailing his triumphs of oddly begotten dreams

Inviting the nerveless to feel once more

That fierce dying of humans consumed

In raging fires of Love.

Source: Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1965)

Biography

A Beat poet, and founder of the journal Beatitude with Allen Ginsberg and others, poet Bob Kaufman was born in New Orleans in 1925 to a German Jewish father and a black Catholic mother. As a young man, he joined the U.S. Merchant Marine, briefly studied at the New School in New York, and moved to San Francisco, where he associated with such writers as Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Ginsberg.

Kaufman was a . . .

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