Thursday, December 4, 2025

Tell It to Coltrane

Spill your woes to Coltrane.
Let jazz put troubles into the funky fugue
and turn them into incense
rising from cigarettes in the club
where only the shadows of dead men play.
Give your grief to Beethoven.
His ninth is broad and bold enough
to swallow your rants and raves,
sound rising and pulsing rhythm
in an orgasm of strings and brass
hung on a score with a thousand staves.
Hang your bitching out to dry
with Shakespeare’s iambic play it on the fly.
After deliberation, Hamlet will stab your heartache,
Prince Escalus restore the butchered peace
to Verona after the star-crossed lovers die.
Bury your pain with the brush or pen,
with the saxophone playing the midnight den.
Scream like Edvard on the Oslo bridge
and let the Jumblies go to sea in a sieve.
Let canvas, page, and lute absorb your pain,
the fever pitch, your last damn nerve,
the witch-wife that mixes up the migraine.
Then sit by the pasture’s unnamed brook.
The world is not to die for, but to live.

~William Hammett



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