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Morton Marcus: Jesus, black Jesus, he's sauntering down the street, he's saying hello. And he hopes he might meet you or him or her. This is the city. It's always a city. When the drums are loud, the saxophones awaiting, stand up very proud.

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And behind it all the noise in the shadows of the bass player. Dark avocados, celery green, plum purple, a plum purple hood. It's the Madonna beyond the lampposts in the dark of the alleys, the black Jesus come to town not like Santa Claus. He'll

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wear a frown. He's waiting to tell us that this is the dark night. The Equinox has come and gone, the town with a knife, like a black eyebrow above it. The lid of Jesus will close and that will be the end of it.

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Skipping down the street, blood cells red and white, coins jingling in all our veins. Little girl, watch her, gets to the curb, can't stop moving, dancing up and down. The light will change. She will cross into years, into youth and

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motherhood. Little girl on the street, pocketful of change, what are we gonna say? Where are we going to be? Watching the little girls moving, two or three, five, six, sixteen and seven, lovers, mothers on the other side of heaven. I know a

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girl, couldn't believe she was once a child. Hot and sexy all seams and smile. Damp, the dark and hairy. I loved her the way Joseph must have loved Mary. Not like a goddess but earthy and true. Woman in my bed, I'm in love with you.

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Now, listen to the bass. It grumbles, a slow walker. It asks the drums to be a quieter talker. Meanwhile, the sax goes humming along. The bass completely stops, something's wrong. Whoops, I almost tripped. Here they come. We're ready to

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start, ready to hum. There's a jingle or a jangle or a horn's long hoot. Can you hear the bass like a great big boot ready to come walking? Here the four of us are. We're walking home with you and we'll go just so far as you do and father will leave you

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with the door and go walking and walking, playing some more. Where itinerant musicians coming from a country road, we come from East Europe, we come from an Indian town. I mean, East Indian, Hindu, Muslim. Sound is the same, we're walking beside

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you. The name of the game is that we're all together and the sound remains the same. Now, if you don't understand what I'm saying right now, that's okay. I really don't know either. I've lost all my rhymes. I'm telling you now I'm in a living room yet

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walking beside you. You're hearing me in a magazine, a special issue that's been recorded. It's not in words, it's not on a page, it's on the skins of a drum. Hollow reed, cat gut, a balloon squeezed which sounds like a baby's

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blather. It wants its mama, if that's so, I hope we're gonna be a family now. And getting quiet so the kid can fall to sleep. And if that isn't an ending that's left in the air like a cobra's head sniffing a scare, then I don't know but the

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music's become Asian. It's always no matter what country, however, a celebration. Okay, folks, here we go, orangutan. Okay, folks, here we go, orangutan. Muskox, big brown bear, that's how I define

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myself. And I'm going there with a muskox, big brown bear, clumps of three shadows. Going down the road again I don't know. Wherever I'd go, wherever I'd get to was where I was meant to be. Going from here to there and I think you can see, it's up

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beat, beat up up. It's a beat that's why I say orangutan, muskox, big brown bear. All three of us plus a blackbird are going there. A little haiku: there was an antelope who ate a cantaloupe.

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When asked if that was God, it said, no. You can't take poetry too serious or the world will seem like some place delirious. All the buildings, and all the trees will bloom and swirl. Nothing is solid. The world is there. You

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can touch it with your hand. It's gone cabbage. It's charred. It's lettuce and onions. It's redwood trees like the fur of a bear. You can breathe, run your hands through its hair. The world is too much with us but is the good. If it wasn't, you

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wouldn't be able to knock wood. So, you see there's this goofy guy. One of those guys that sort of springs from the soles of his shoes, doesn't look like he's walking. Looks like, well, he's feeling the blues. He came down

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the street in a sweatshirt, Levi trousers, long nose, long jar, spiky teeth. He sent shivers up the backbones of anyone he'd meet. Now, I haven't set this in town or city, farm community or anywhere else. You know this guy. If you haven't seen him so

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far, the quiet will tell you he's very near. He'll knock on the door and shake and scintillate and wait till you turn the knob, then watch out. See what I mean? He's someone you know though he can't be

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seen. I can't hear, I'm touching the sky. Hey, let me come down. I want to get out, it's too loud here for a guy my age. Moonlight, white buildings flat, two, three stories high against an indio sky. Wooden ladders from each level, it is the

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silent towns Tangiers, North African coast. These are the evenings we value the most because the town so quiet, it is the silence inside us. It is the loneliness that everyone knows. All of us goes whether we admit it or not. Alone in these

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buildings, a woman walks over a man, a child restless in sleep. What you're hearing are the instruments that give this voice and the words' just another musical choice. Together the town comes alive. [inaudible] around the corners. You can see

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the dirt tracks which are the roads [inaudible]. Out of the hallways, the people, ready for the night, together in the hot and sultry weather. Who are you in this scene? A businessman ready to worry about just so many shackles. Take something in

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the pockets. The woman who longs for love for the man she hasn't been. Or the youth, always the youth, boy or girl, [inaudible] stroll through the streets in the rhythm of his own heartbeats. To get to know what the world is and where we all go

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on a North Africa evening which could be in a California town, it could be in Nepal, or the Tokyo Ginza with the neon lights and the watery beads of electrical signs, with the pop, the snap, the crackle, the reebok that makes the modern

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night of the world. Everything that we have seen and been is the same as it was in the North Africa town lives inside us. An old man, a woman standing at the windows remembering [inaudible], wherever this was as the blood begins to beat, as it chortles

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and rolls down the steep sides of the artery and vein. As we all remember alumnis, and as you accompanies us like a shadow in Tokyo, Tangiers, or San Francisco. Get on a country road, steep sky, blue above a field of wheat

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or oats, and he going north, south, east, or west, he don't know. But what he knows is the sound and rhythm of his blood [inaudible] of the sun on his arms. His elbows wide swinging down the road. This is what goes on when you breathe and don't

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know direction and don't care, moving to the melody, you're not even a body but a melody clanging down the road, feeling the keys in your pockets, the coins, even the dollar bills, maybe just one or two rolling in your pockets, wondering where

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you'll be in five hours' time. Wondering if this is what you were planning to do for all of your life and hope it doesn't stop, just strolling along with yourself. Redwinged black birds on the horizon. Black birds on the golden fields and there in

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front of you, the whole wide day, the road stretching out wherever it goes and you just following along [inaudible] to another hour. Apple, plum, peach, pear, we're getting there. Avocado, tomato,

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cherry, egg, say what you want, just don't beg. Apple, plum, peach, and pear, fruits of the world are getting us there. Tomato, cherry, egg, root, root, root. If I had an instrument, no, I won't say. Apple, plum, peach, pear. Tomato, cherry,

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egg. Are we there? This is about rhythm, voice, music. The poet's choice of apple or plum or peach or pear. I think we're just about there. Sounds in the garden, not yet night. The red-winged blackbird

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slides a branch. The ring dove [unidentified] itself into a corner and the plants yearn toward the sky. Who can settle into sleep before the night comes on? The cat stalks beneath the tree, black in gray shadows or gray shadows in black. Lucky

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dove among carnations, rose, blue jays, cockatoos, parrots. Oh, the long desire to crack birds in his jaws, the cat saunters, creeps, stretches. Garden sounds just before it's night. On the back porch watching the garden, disappear,

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the walls hum hollow. I can change the mood with just one word. 52nd street, when I was a boy, listened to Lester Young, the bread. The bird in his last days, [inaudible]. Jazz band of

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the 50s, Rawlins, Stan still going. 52nd Street, the neon signs, radiant, glowing, this is what I remember from when I was a boy. The songs I grew on road as if they were houses down the nighttime streets of a disappeared New York,

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disappeared boyhood, when what you could hear, no one had heard before. Gone forever, a closed door. Kid, let me see your ID, false, of course. Just like me, listening, but not hearing the sadness, the need from any of the musicians until it was too

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late. And I was older would make those same noises which no one hears now even though I celebrate the loneliness that all of us knows so well but won't listen to others ever. The soul flutters above my head, there it goes, dark black wings,

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flutter never taking off as the threads were attached, but there's a soul in my foot, and that's an old pun. I'm working on it every day from eleven to one. But what I see and what I hear, the spirit in me, I can walk all over it but it flutters

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and moves whether I stand or sit, moving above a little head getting ready for a drumroll, a presentation, a beginning but when I walk on it, I realized beginning and end is the very same thing. Soul in my foot, soul fluttering above my head.