Social media knows that sacred image wouldn’t have
struck you had it not been (re)posted by an artist
you admire from a distance & have mutuals with.

The teacher asks each of us to write out
“Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadooloop.”
I ask the piano what instrument it plays.

The piano starts playing itself again,
improvisation at a remove from improve,
the live show that got cancelled, as if holism is

a family band, a neo-imploding leafy possible.
“I want to be overused by the vibraphone for a while.”
The drummer doesn’t have to tell us to play a dirge.

What if it’s a purely neurobiological thing; free your lips
& fingers & the throat & lung part of the soul will follow
till it leads & fools the ears into thinking you love the sounds?

“Water rabbit says the answer to war isn’t
necessarily peace, it’s creativity & agility.”

+++

A cornet may tumble into piano chords
& a bass flub for the right keys, but the congas
call the meeting to order, or a loose groove
on the “what’s so funny about law & order” changes.

Can creativity & agility be peacing? Imagine
all those toxic cuckold horns in Shakespeare blew jazz
to soothe the overstimulated, restless and fickle.
I was feeling too half-in, half-out again, until the bass

started playing a riff that, becoming recognizable, turns
into heard words seen as numbers “99 ½ just won’t do…
got to have a 100” Ninety-nine and a half …a hundred..
Got to   got to   got to…. (got two too…)…

Get back into H2O walking. “Last year was based on aggression
2023 should provide balance if you can embrace life’s wobbles
with the ‘kwyet konfidence’ of the water rabbit”
outside commotion’s connotation cages.

+++

I’m a so so so and so celebrating the taco truck
liberating itself from the laugh track it’s been
trapped in, the laugh track in the sit com
but not the oil ad. Laughing with or @?

Arrows of rage narrow with age, though
algorithms may suck you back from an open curiosity.
“They’re arguing about what to call us again.”
“Maybe we should start doing that too.”

David called indie rock a roped-off theme park.
Slow the scroll.  Even the acoustic drums & horns
can scare away the birdsongs that inspired them,

but enough about me. My research, left alone,
reaches for footnotes and exceptions, and so on.
How many phones does it take to change an internet?

+++

Parts parting. Goodbye, division. Close closing, getting closer.
“I don’t like that melody.” “I’ll play the same melody
on the higher notes.” “I like it now.” You taught me
the difference between composing & arranging

was primarily a legal term of intellectual property
because “the music industry can only count to 1.”
Now I’m a processed food: feral referees exchange
fluid’s refugee funerals. Is offensive a contranym?

The groundhog saw its shadow, but not theAudubon Zoo aardvark;
neither did the Staten Island Woodchuck or Oklahoma City bears.
Are we still in the monoculture? Saturn & The Sun sing
behind the earth’s back, in front of the front, bleeding maraca tears

I lack the fluidity of James Booker, or Huey “Piano” Smith (RIP)
but am more of what Gil Scott Heron called rhythm piano without a Brian.

*

Chris Stroffolino currently lives in Oakland. A recent dialogue/conversation with Adeena Karasick appears in the Feb. 2023 issue of the Brooklyn Rail. He also published review/essays of Tureeda Mikell, Joanna Fuhrman, Maw Shein Win, and Anne Boyer in Konch, Entropy, and The Rumpus.