Sarah Helena, “Krishna Plays Jazz

Krishna Plays Jazz

Sarah Helena

Firedrum raingun shooting down Times Square, blending a circus of light with ordinary blindness

A heavy umbrella protects bald heads with fizzy brains from thin showers, rinsed in petrol soap, a bathtub for clean conscience.

I can’t stand the heavy heartbeats I hear rushing out from subway exits, I can’t stand the soaking platforms which drown my feet underground, I can’t stand the myriad of strangers coughing up their lunches.

I love sitting surrounded by Broadway’s blur of mania pretending to write a piece of public interest, the guy to my right I’m sure is a real playwright

I love clearing my lungs through the honking horns of this Manhattan steamhouse, sensing the divine by self-medicating with saxophone basements, I adore seeing his face appear through tar scratches explicitly woven by the yellow cab veins that pump the city alive.

I hear him through the inhalation of the pianist’s last cigarette puff right before he goes back down to spell his name in B-flat.

I get shivers from his heavy clouds pushed down from the sky where he resides

He’s so strangely LIFE.

I mark the day he first spoke to me to make it an anniversary but realise – he was never quiet.

I close my eyes to wake up. I close the books to learn his language. I put my lips into a frame that build an entry to his name.

When he skips the intro and dives right into the fury sounds of perceptive bounds that explode like bubbles of dream, I find myself plunged into rewind, turn around, turn around, back to start and tap to the world as he made it,

not as I see it.