TEXT: Broken in Parts: A Healing Song for Saxophone & Voice
for Oliver Lake & Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) 1941–1998
I. broken in parts, broken in parts, the earth fractured & fissured
is broken in parts, voices censored, broken off in space,
in their place the silent ooze of breathing, pulsating between worlds
between place parts of syntax floating on surfaces of speech like islands
floating in the middle of rivers, in the middle of nowhere & everywhere
zigzagging omens waving flags of menace like flapping tongues,
everything seemingly coming apart in a sea of wreckage,
someone is drowning we don’t hear or see,
threads suddenly gone, clues, beliefs
suddenly torn asunder by sawblading teeth, hemorrhaging
a life chewed up between jackhammering jaws,
as a razor cuts through a living tongue & it is bleeding
speech cannot form itself again around words,
when language we once knew but now hear as garbled
is broken in parts
II. what to do then, when men and women cannot speak,
when meaning is sawed off clean & language becomes a chimney chute
through which sound sweeps as ash coating everything with a sooty pallor,
before syllables can form in the cave of the spirit that issues words, cadences,
that used to roll out like musical notes off the sweetness tongues suddenly cut
clean to blooming silence, dumb screams there now, oozing blood,
where the silver steel flashed red underneath Halloween street lamps,
flies swarming around a gaggle of slit throats
& in the middle of it all a chewed up black pencil of a man,
who stands holding his tongue between his hands,
silence surrounding him like a mourning shawl,
the tongue in his hands now was once a saxophone when whole,
was a blur of fingers whooshing through golden keys of his voice belling
like charlie parker burning riffs quick as michael johnson cruising
solo, lickety-split his turbo-driven voice used to turn flips,
somersaults, turn around in midair like great Olympic figure skaters,
their bodies doing twists, the moment there alive, fused
with magic, probed limits of the tongue, unpredictable as mystery,
it once moved to recreate itself, again & again through improvisation,
sought to push the edge of its creation out beyond boundaries of what
anything would allow, the vocabulary flowing back & forth,
like a mantra, before silence cut through
its song, turned it into ripples on the surface of a river, gone
after a rock dropped through its shimmering, wet skin, through a vortex,
where the eye now catches a language of shadows, once lengthening,
now they are breaking apart in waves of fragmentation
III. but we can speak with our eyes, can fashion them into a tongue,
can turn that tongue into a living voice that conjures up song,
conjures up spirits, the drumbeat of strong hearts goosing everything along,
like a great drummer keeping time, evenly kept, pulsating breath, strong,
sluicing through the tempo of the lungs,
through death we can travel backward to ancestors through our spirits,
through our mind’s juju, we can go down to the station of resurrection,
wait for the underground train marked with vévés to arrive there,
we can board that train, dream ourselves into magic through imagination,
can walk inside history longside power sleeping deep down inside us, now,
deeper still, deeper than the limits of fear ever allowed us to travel,
because our black cat’s bone knows the mojo spirit is listening,
knows the mojo bone can rest in our hands if we dream ourselves deeper,
deep enough to dream ourselves into beauty, deeper still, go down deeper,
so we can conjure up the power of that black mojo hand,
deeper, so we can restore speech to a severed tongue cut off in a storm
by buzz saw slivers of glass propelled through the dark,
by the awesome power of a tornado’s wind,
or cut off by evil, unhuman men, who think love is a gun, a bloody knife,
we can conjure up the power of a black mojo hand, can reconnect
flesh with flesh, expression, can beat human madness with our own magic,
voodoo, can reconnect these islands of words floating through broken
sentences, fractured and fissured, broken apart,
words floating like drowned faces bloated after a sudden flood brought death,
we can reconnect these words & fashion a language out of silence and space,
a language of fragments that can float in the air like chords,
echoing the music of monk’s genius,
we can feel it if we listen, can reconnect that pencil-thin black man’s tongue,
once a saxophone’s voice, can stitch that voice back together again into song,
into music again with a needle stitching love, can weave magic
fashioned there out the bone of a mojo-hand,
can put it all back together agin if we listen & feel love,
sluicing poetry & voodoo out of a mojo hand,
within the spirit of healing,
magic & mystery, the song becoming beauty, so listen to beauty
beating in your own human hearts, listen to the healing
powers fashioned from bone of our own mojo hand
IV. & the music is jabber-walking across space & air
& comes whispering
a whispering comes carrying
the burden of silence with it for so very long,
beyond this whispering of echoes,
is a wish to reconnect language, this tongue broken in parts,
broken articulation, beliefs, clues, broken into islands of words,
phrases, isolated beyond meaning, now
silence breaking into sound that is guttural, blues seeded,
inside timbre of the voice rising now to form some kind of language,
it is reaching for beauty, trying to unify fragments
into complete sentences,
though broken apart it is trying to coalesce,
come back together again, for love,
for beauty, for family, so listen
for words that float up from the abyss into recognizable sound that evokes
familiar faces, that pulled out of a raging, flooded river,
see recognition now in those blinking eyes,
magic unfolding in language rising up from there, now guttural but pure,
is reborn here as the tongue’s restored, reconnected,
speech returned to voice
inside the mouth
& new words form that roll off the tongue,
carry faces carved from history,
faces that string themselves together to fashion a memory,
a memory that is a necklace of love beads draped around our necks,
imagine those faces as metaphors now, seeds
for love songs whispering,
tonguing now just outside your ear,
imagine those words as possible healing powers,
a healing love song, whispering now
whispering, inside your ear
From the Collection: CHORUSES (1999) published by Coffee House Press. Quincy Troupe’s poem “Broken in Parts” reprinted by permission.