How Long Has That Train Been Gone? (Professor Longhair)

The train’s vacancy left red steam
along the hives of trees which sang
jonquils and anisette like haloes rising
negotiating vowels of wood.

Baby Won’t You Please Come Home? (Miles Davis)

Home is a stone snared within a stone
and all its dark persuadings cleave their tongues
to my condition—my head holds honeyed apprehension
and my legs are insidious, but stunning bolts.

Didn’t It Rain? (Mahalia Jackson)

Metallic irradiation casts itself on all skin—
a self-upbraiding liquid. It expostulates joy,
yet overarched a sweet ether sets its glaze.
Rain-regions of thought have similar introversions.

How Deep Is The Ocean? (Irving Berlin)

The ocean insinuatingly breathes permutations.
It etches proscribing words like fish drying:
all beautiful people are exempt from the incantations  
of decay, but what of the long-fringed fire in the piano’s lungs?

What Is This Thing Called Love? (Cole Porter)

There is no sex in immaculateness; only distance
wherein a perfection forms precisely because
s/he is unavailable for caresses, comments, seeing movies.
The projecting curve is as red as a cannibal.

Where Did You Sleep Last Night? (Lead Belly)

I became a bee and my resolute reveling led me
to an octagonal pouch; the devil saw no bee,  
and heard no sound from bee, but only, by intervals,  
wrapped me in a black and yellow blanket.

So What? (Miles Davis)

Coltrane’s forty-minute solos had gone on
once too many times for Miles, his boss,
and he apologized, not knowing when to stop.
Said Miles: “Take the goddamn horn out your mouth!”