Here to bless your ears

Poetry and Jazz in Hell's Kitchen (with audio)

Here is a really stellar recording and text from last night's performance at the Local 802 AFM Union Hall. This weekend I performed alongside Gene Pritsker’s ensembles for the Composers Concordance of NYC at the Local 802 and the Queens New Music Festival. I’m really digging working with this group of exceptional musicians.

Very grateful to share this piece with you, I think you’ll enjoy it.

Recording of Modern Life (the poem) from live performance on May 8, 2023 at Local 802 AFM in Hells Kitchen with Gene Pritsker (Guitar), Larry Goldman (Bass), and David Cossin (Drums)

Modern Life (the poem)

Re-manufactured post-manufactured waste-land’s perpetual materializing of green-friendly split-(eco)-consciousness enviro-cide enablers. 


Quotidian violence on this rock home made 
House of plasticine horrors, wherein we carry out 
Our duties of working, learning, practicing mindfulness 
To earn fulfillment, carting about InLine 
     tamper-evident polypropylene cubes of pre-cut fruit,
romping gleefully courtesy of/despite 
Fully embodied global destruction.

Deafened to the ticking down of history’s final act,
Pyromaniacs disguised as Firemen-
And why shouldn’t we be?

In France a woman emerged from a cave after 500 days and said 

There’s a protocol logic to manipulating consciousness: 

a relationship to the possibilities of reality 
that has an open-ended experimental quality 

Which is Both playful and strange.

Ignorance and knowledge 
the secular sin and redemption.

We’re used to living in a world where we don’t understand how the machines around us work,
Our phone our Cars our toilets

Your microwaveable vegan enchilada from Trader Joe’s traveled as far to get to your freezer as the average American does in a year by boat train plane car,

We live in an age of science and of abundance 

and there’s no going back 

Now what do we do with that? 

I want to be paid $250k a year to wander through an open field

What does it mean to be a community 
Where information is more persuasive When it’s in a good story?

The best painters I know work and live in closet studios taking day jobs to buy enough of their life back for the 
diligent pursuit (largely in solitude)
of an artistic vision that will contribute
in perpetuity to the spirit of humanity. 

Where’s their silicon VC angel seed round?

I’ve sat with the charismatic story tellers
shelling half baked ideas
swaddled in pitch decks —
I’ve made no great discoveries. 

But — Petty resentments erode
capacity for self fulfillment
by obscuring the global picture.

Perhaps steeping in
a cynical a pre-determined belief that others have wronged you
Is poison. 

Contrived travail only diminishes the quality of life —

There is a kind of poverty where you have an excess of things, and all your energy is directed toward getting and keeping them.

It takes grace to bail yourself out
of messes inevitable to human existence. 

Think back to glimpses of your own genius - you were waiting for an authority to validate that genius for you. 
But— here’s the best part 
you are your own authority figure. And
You’re are a genius
You’re are a genius 
You’re are a genius

---

This performance also featured poets Imelda O’Reilly, Erik T. Johnson, Robert C. Ford, and John Pietaro.

My reading is in duet with composer Gene Pritsker’s original piece Born Free. You can hear more of his work on spotify or at GenePritsker.com .

Thank you for reading, listening, and being part of my journey.

The Audience, The Poem and The Poet (Illustration by Kelsea Brunner)