My recently published piece for "Flow Magazine"
visit www.flowmag.com

Jazz, of the howling dead:

Howling along the coast;
the champagne shores,
dancing the blue mambo
as her chest swells
aflight a soft wind
whispering soft wisdom
of summers passed...
When she hoisted
the tomahawk of war
upon her breast
to distant shores

and Hail! the piping muse

"We sank all night in submarine light
of Bickford's floated out and sat
through the stale beer afternoon
in desolate fugazzi's, listening
to the crack of doom on the
hydrogen jukebox"

As time unwinds it's helicoil
to laughing sirens abroad
as the fiery moon slumps
upon a blood red sea.

There was "the sawdust saloon,
all wood, with a small bandstand...
Women wandered in bathrobes,
bottles clanked in alleys.
In back of the joint
in a dark corridor beyond
the splattered toilets,
scores of men and women
stood against the wall
drinking wine-spodi-odi
and spitting at the stars...
wine, whiskey and beer."
winding off the road
"and talking with the dead
and driving the freeways
with the dead and standing
in supermarkets with the dead"...

to the horizon
of a dead sun,
and the skeletons
in the connect-the-dot
light of winter night

where the final page
rings shots aloud
to the world
that is me
in this empty space
between champagne
and the sea.

- Tim Jeffers, The Flow Magazine


*A poetic expressional tribute to my personal influences: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski.

Line's in parenthesis Stanza 3:
Allen Ginsberg; excerpt from Howl

Line's in parenthesis stanza 5:
Jack Kerouac; excerpt from Jazz of the beat generation

Line's in parenthesis stanza 6:
Charles Bukowski; excerpt from Walking with the dead.

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