Soft Jazz

Soft Jazz

Mark Coleman
 

   That feeling of boundlessness that portends love. It comes unprovoked and undeserved. A firing of cylinders set off by a night breeze or a limo service advert. A culmination of small, seemingly meaningless things that somehow merge together endlessly. Sprinklers desiring play. A dress wet and clinging. The breast bared and heaving. Broken bits of vision.

   Cocktail of dusk and dust. Incantation segmented and speared. Vocation motes spiraling. The gait takes on a new dimension. Light year stepping through monstrance gateways. A host, straight from the Rider deck, positioning for comfort and ease. Eiderdown, wadded for cushioning, accepting the divested buttocks. Vacillating fleece coiffed by unsteady hands, which at invitation, become fleshy picks. The breathless gasp at penetration and the momentary cessation that follows. A repose in the auburn hair.

   The eyes jolt, the lips part and pucker towards the taste of another. The saliva clinging at the juncture like infants to maternal bosoms. Diamonds gently pulled in strands. The cavalcade of springs awakening from disuse. Supporting the weight of rapacious unity. An evening reborn in creaks and groans. Crashing back and forth like lunar china. The foreshadowed timing of climax read in the pupils, shining like votive candles at a midnight mass. Burgundy sipped through the grilles and chasms.

   Tatted up in doll admiration and strutting the town beneath like so much dross. Beached throughout. Wrack bulb popping. Children dragging it behind them as they rush towards the ebbing tide. Cave exploration beneath the promontories. Stealing a kiss or copping a feel. Held in captivation by the gems that eagerly spur Chauvet inspiration. The easel held like one tiny, crooked elbow in another. The first corsage and the first buttonhole. Picnicking long distance in a hotel room with the phone cradle and the Gideon Bible for companionship. And a T.V. set that’s more of a blister than the moon.

   The cold outside dehumanizing the leaves of curiously bent trees. Leaving nothing but stiff, arthritic fingers gnawed to the bone from want and the once reality of the past. Sitting on the edge of the bed with a handful of fingers following the creases of a pillowcase stale from over-washing. Taking the fat out of the fire, and using it to cook nutrition-less food eaten in solitude.

   An old radio, quite aware of its disrepair and loss, trying in vain to pipe something vaguely resembling music. Sheet music strewn over the floor with the bones of Father Time for company. All of yesteryear glimpsed through chiffon curtains and lost wisps of smoke. Forever seeking solace and consolation in the half-actualized gloom of memory. Patterned silk remembered in terms of the contours that it captured and held with such melancholy and brilliance. Faded smiles beckoning regret and loneliness. Something resembling soft jazz falling over the hush. Slowly rhythmic, it edges into the cracks of broken hearts where it forgets to flower. Mists on a horizon out of reach. Punished with Prometheus and Sisyphus. And the Son of the Morning.