Blue Note

thank you for visiting.
this town—
a mouth of saxophones.
you’ll love it.
or hate it.
but either way,
the sound stays.

how long’s it been?
since we slipped
through the back alley
of a burning country,
stage smoke on our collars,
gravel in our teeth.

twenty years since
I last sang
beneath a chandelier
shaped like a crown.
forty since they lined up
in velvet coats
to watch me
rise from silence
& fall
back into it.

memory presses harder
than this bone-thick air.
they say:
music lives forever.
but I live
inside a broken octave.

my brother—
if I can call him that—
stitched me
into this gold-lined
grotesque.

come closer.
feel the fire's hush.
it sounds like applause
from behind a curtain.
watch the logs—
each one
a former tree
flattening into
the color of forgetting.

he said I could
be preserved.
said the voice
was worth
whatever came after.

& what came after
was a clamp.
a white coat.
an open lie
about a fall
that never happened.

opium.
a shallow bowl.
a sound
that split the room
from my future.

the body,
made holy
by removal.
they said I sang
like god.
like gold
being melted
& poured
into a throat.

the cities bowed.
the marquees blinked
my name
into every dusk.
but no one asked
where the rest of me
had gone.

I did not take a wife.
the dark
between the notes
was enough.

still, I wonder:
could the voice
have deepened
& remained divine?

what if I was meant
to be thunder,
not lightning?

I’ll never know.
what was taken
wasn’t just
what made me
a man.

it was the hour
I was never allowed
to grow into.
the father
I could’ve become.
the song
I might’ve written
in another key.

I sleep now
in houses built
by my own ruin.

I’ve made peace
with the velvet,
the smoke,
the fame.
but there are nights
when my breath
catches
on a note
that’s not there.

a silence
only I
can hear.

a death
I must
sing alone.