"Dusty Blue" composed by jazz trumpeter Howard McGhee is the title tune of the first jazz album I ever owned. It had a strong influence on me. I've played it a million times. If I hadn't been such a self-conscious, insecure kid I might have learned to express myself wailing on a horn. Instead, I cloistered my brass soul in the basement and screeched out bad notes to an unsympathetic upstairs audience (my family) who begrudgingly put up with their in-house inept musician.

The poem I wrote in tribute to "Dusty Blue" is the first poem I ever uttered out loud, solo, to strangers. Not on a stage. Not at a party. Not at some relative's funeral. No, my first dip into what keeps me living now was on a Boeing 727 returning with my banjo-playing DJ buddy Stan from Las Vegas after a three day weekend of debauchery.

How many half dozen sorties of airline vodka and tonics (those deceptively destructive teeny weeny bottles) we downed I don't know, but somewhere over Kansas I stood up and began belting out

"The MOON when SWINGing TRUMpets BLOW / goes BLUE when RED the RHYthm CUTS ..." to the (it was a midnight-early morning flight) sleep-eyed passengers.

Hey, what the heck! I was a winner, weren't they?

Apparently not.

If they coulda, they woulda made me walk the wing.

Back on the ground at O'Hare International Airport, as we
crowded down the ramp into the concourse, I was the recipient of
several bumps and shoves and venomous epitaphs, including one
down-to-earth statement of fact: "You ... are an asshole."

The moon, when swinging trumpets blow,

Goes blue as red the rhythm cuts

The rain with saucy cinder-beats;

And blackbirds hop the high hot lines.

(It's a scats madder scene.)

In cellar grays where notes collide

The bulb's half eclipse cleaves a brain;

And "Death," the wailing madman cries,

"Leaves me half breaths, baby."

Oh, the wind that crosses elms at night

Flows through the tubes of tacit life

Proclaiming in its haunting moan,

"All is senseless, Pops."

But the brew within the brassy stove

Cooks clean to alabaster bones;

And "Fame" the jiving jazzman's told,

"Hangs with the blackbirds

Up on those high hot lines!"

It's a blue-black crooked dream.