Plastic Pattern People

(album: Small Talk At 125th And Lenox - 1970)

Glad to get high and see the slow motion world.
Just to reach, and touch, the half notes floating.
Worlds spinning orbit quicker than 9/8ths Dave Brubeck.
We come now, frantically searching for Thomas Moore, rainbow villages.
Up on suddenly, Charlie Mingus and our man Abdul Malik,
to add bass, to a bottomless pit of insecurity.

You may be plastic because you never meditate,
about the bottom of glasses, The third side of your universe.

Add on Alice Coltrane and her cosmic strains.
Still no vocal on blue black horizons.

Your plasticity is tested by a formless assault.
The sun can answer questions in tune, to all your sacrifices.
But why would our new jazz age give us no more mind expanding puzzles?

Enter John.

Blow from under, always, and never, so that the morning, the sun,
may scream of brain bending saxophones.

The third world arrives, with Yusef Lateef, and Pharaoh Saunders.
With oboes straining to touch the core of your unknown soul.
Ravi Shankar comes, with strings attached, prepared to stabilize your seventh sense,
Your black rhythm.

Up and down a silly ladder run the notes, without the words.
Words are important for the mind, but the notes are for the soul.
Miles Davis, So what?
Cannonball, Fiddler, Mercy.
Dexter Gordon, One Flight Up.
Donald Byrd, playing Cristo, but what about words?

Would you like to survive on sadness? Call on Ella and Jose Happiness.
Drift with Smokey, Bill Medley, Bobby Taylor, and Otis Redding.
Soul music where frustrations are washed by drums, Nina and Miriam.

Congo, Mongo, Beat me, senseless, bongo, Tonto.
Flash through dream worlds of STP and LSD.
Speed kills and sometimes musics call, is frustrated.
And the black man is confused.

Our speed is our life pace, much too fast, not good.
I beg you to escape, and live, and hear all of the real.
Until a call comes for you to cry elsewhere.
We must all cry, but tell me.

Must our tears be white?