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Booker Little’s Deliverance

Your blood, poisoned by neither drink nor drugs,
but the ravening appetite of some fickle force
we can’t fathom; the way hearts attack us or else
our systems are assailed by cells made to invade.

At least fate had the courtesy to inquire if you had
any final words: your short life’s work summarized
on two albums that scorn mortality, even as death
circled your ailing body like a demented buzzard.

Strength and sanity, victory and sorrow—
calling softly: holding a lantern, showing
us some of what you were already seeing.

Was this expression—an elegiac storm still able
to inspire and console, capable of changing lives
half a century after it got stuck to magnetized tape;
just another day in the studio, that odd laboratory
of mournful miracles—worth all it took to make?

Those revelations transmitted from the impassive edge
of elsewhere, a place memory and deed are annihilated:
some insatiable absence of being where all sound ceases.

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(Booker Little, a virtuosic composer and trumpet player, died tragically at 23 due to complications from uremia. Prolific during his abbreviated career, Little managed to lead two influential sessions in 1961, despite being in considerable and constant pain.)

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Sean Murphy has appeared on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and appeared in USA Today, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and AdAge. A long-time columnist for PopMatters, his work has also appeared in Salon, The Village Voice, Washington City Paper, The Good Men Project, Memoir Magazine, and others. He has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and his chapbook, The Blackened Blues, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. To learn more, visit seanmurphy.net

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Listen to Booker Little play “Man of Words,” from his 1961 Candid release Out Front

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Click here to visit Booker Little’s Wikipedia page

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