So What: We’re on loan from the Unknown rollin’ home by the light of a polyglot tongue with humongous lungs what got its own. While tornado breeze brings tall trees to their knees, old bones shrug off groans of whatnots bemoaned. Seen souls leapin’ outta matter’s mad hatter into gravity’s split-&-splatter for a bitter battered ceremony ‘round a hangin’ tree’s the data. As goes wars of peace, danglin’ feet get steeped six deep in the Big Sleep ‘cause comin’ through slaughter, bangin’ borders yields a black & blue disorder. Reapin’ Mother Morgue’s McLock-up, we be creepin’ through eye-sockets just to drop the whole crock of it, torn free from ‘buked & scorned-born’s woe-is-me song.

So What if Miles the icon lifted the chord structure from Morton Gould’s symphonic Pavanne. Likewise Trane on Impressions, odes we know the changes of & dimensions to for we were born to stop time, dropped dead on a dime in Dorian mode. Burnin’ ops popped from a harder be-bop we banded & blended into horn scales of glimmer-toned rhythm with a shimmer of a gumbo simm’rin’: flavor-drenched airs to glide a viper’s wing & prayer into worlds out there unknown where there’s nowhere to go but in how the goin’—& how the goin’ gets goin’ so moodily, Moorishly & rubaiyat melodic movin’ like a wondrous water garden where So What’s two notes amen a cadence that aligns the three worlds. Only then would we see a dervish’s whirl indwell the wings of the roarin’ waterfall.

Kirpal Gordon is the author of Round Earth, Open Sky (sci-fi novel), Lyrical Miracle (prose poems set to jazz), New York at Twilight (stories) & Go Ride the Music (jazz novel), among others. Check him at www.KirpalG.com &/or www.GiantStepsPress.com.