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The Bullocks Oriole Plays The Blue Note

by Eric Meyer

O you sweet be-
spectacled bird!
you’re too cool for me
sitting there perched
in your wild catbird seat
with your sleek black
beatnik goatee &
blindman’s shades
pulled down low over
your hot orange
djellabiya while you
spill out shrill jazz
riffs and raffs
with here & there an off-beat
whistle or a hoot
thrown in just for laughs
you know they say you
play like mad
old Rahsaan Roland Kirk or
maybe crazy
Sun Ra & his whole
Celestial Light Arkestra
just blowing
a breathless flurry of
wildly out-of-tune notes
without knowing
where you’re going
or what
you’re doing here on earth but
I know you’re just
an old bird-brained jazzman
whistling a few bars &
faking it & making
the whole world sit up & listen
‘cuz you’re the birdman
of Alakazam!
& whatever they say
you just play & play &
you sure know how
to jam, man!

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Eric D. Meyer is an ol’ Coyote Jazz Bhuddha forest tramp and Beat Zen lunatic, who’s spent many years hiking the wild forest paths and wilderness retreats of the Pacific Northwest, sometimes taking time to scrawl cryptic glyphs and off-beat poems on rocks.. He’s also a former Asst. Prof. of English lit. (Ph.D. UW-Madison 1991) and a Continental philosophy student, whose recent book is: Questioning Martin Heidegger: On Western Metaphysics, Bhuddhist Ethics, and the Fate of the Sentient Earth (University
Press, 2013). He’s been known to jam a few bars of cool jazz on clarinet, flute, sax, and guitar, until his teeth fell out and his fingers got too crooked to fret! But he still digs jazz, anyway…

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A Bullocks Oriole plays “Birdland”