‘52 was the year Chet’s junkie friends
Helped him forge a permanent relationship
Between his habit and his horn,
Filling empty spoons with his expensive muse
Whenever he felt out of sorts.
Neither awake nor asleep
When he walked on stage
Cool as a dead movie star,
He drove the ladies wild
With his wide and moony smile,
Pretty-boy voice
And lacquered helmet of slicked-back hair.
First thing he’d do
Was coax Little Girl Blue
Out of her cage—then paint the lyrics
Of her broken heart in dark and somber
Shades of gray, bruised colors he borrowed
From his long disease.
Sometimes a girl in the front row
Would give him a Let’s Get Lost look
Which helped him forget about
The needles in the alleys
And the fresh-dug graves
Long enough to consummate
Their telepathic love affair
With his microphone
By wringing a little honey
Out of Sweet Lorraine,
Something no other trumpet player
Could do, not even Miles.
In the 60’s his career skipped a beat
Like somebody’s bad heart
When a dealer he’d forgotten to pay
Kicked his picket teeth in.
Month after month after that
There were notes he couldn’t quite reach
Because his dentures
Messed with his embouchure,
---Followed by nights
When the lights went out in his veins
Because the last vestige of his afternoon fix
Had dissolved into too much of nothing
In his blood, a problem he solved
By borrowing short term loans
From death
And sticking them in his arm.
Then safe in the certainty of oblivion
For an hour or two
He’d blow candlelight
Out of the shimmering flame in his horn.
Shroud Mood Indigo in an eerie neon glow.
Refract the aura of Green Dolphin street.
And croon My Funny Valentine
As if it were the stuff of dreams
Instead of just a song.
Unless it was one of those gigs
When his tone was so full of troubles
It sounded like a commercial for suicide.
Friends who saw Chet
A week before he died
Said his face looked uninhabited,
Like something its owner had left behind
After he moved away.
They believe he accidently
Fell out of his hotel window,
Only this time there wasn’t
A featherbed of dope to land on.
Critics insist that he took his own life
Because reality finally outed
His inner nobody
And when he held his messy rendezvous
With a sidewalk in Amsterdam
There was no one left inside him
Death could kill.
***
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