As a musician and as an artist, I have always wanted to reach as many people as I could through my music. And I have never been ashamed of that. Because I never thought that the music called “jazz” was ever meant to reach just a small group of people, or become a museum thing locked under glass like all the other dead things that were once considered artistic. I always thought it should reach as many people as it could, like so-called popular music, and why not? I never was one of those people who thought less was better; the fewer who hear you, the better you are, because what you’re doing is just too complex for a lot of people to understand. A lot of jazz musicians say in public that they feel this way, that they would have to compromise their art to reach a whole lot of people. But in secret they want to reach as many people as they can, too. Now, I’m not going to call their names. It’s not important. But I always thought that music had no boundaries, no limits to where it could grow and go, no restrictions on its creativity. Good music is good no matter what kind of music it is. And I always hated categories. Always. Never thought it had any place in music. So I never, ever felt bad because a lot of people were beginning to like what I was doing. I never felt that because the music I was playing was becoming popular that meant that my music was less complex than some that wasn’t as popular as mine. Popularity didn’t make my music any less worthy, or great. In 1955, Columbia represented for me a doorway my music could go through to reach more listeners, and I went through that door when it opened up and never looked back. all I ever wanted to do was blow my horn and create music and art, communicate what I felt through music. And yes, going with Columbia did mean more money, but what’s wrong with getting paid for what you do and getting paid well? I never saw nothing in poverty and hard times and the blues. I never wanted that for myself. I saw what it really was when I was strung out on heroin, and I didn’t want to see it again. As long as I could get what I needed from the white world on my own terms, without selling myself out to all of those people who would love to exploit me, then I was going to go for what I know is real. When you’re creating your own shit, man, even the sky ain’t the limit. Anyway, Bud Powell and his wife, Buttercup, came on the scene to join us. We were all glad to see Bud. He had moved to Paris permanently by this time. Me and Bud were really happy to see each other and we just hugged and carried on like long-lost brothers who had finally found one another. After a few drinks and a lot of conversation, someone said that Bud was going to play. I remember feeling real happy about that because I hadn’t heard Bud play in a long, long time. So he went up to the piano and started to play “Nice Work If You Can Get it.” But after a real fast and great beginning, something happened and his playing just fell apart. It was terrible. I was shocked, like everyone else there that night. Nobody said nothing, just kind of looked at each other like we couldn’t believe what we were hearing. After he finished, there was silence in the club for a while. Then Bud stood up, wiped the sweat off his face with a white handkerchief and sort of bowed. When he did that, we all clapped because we didn’t know what else to do. Man, it was just pitiful to hear him play like that. As Bud left the stage, Buttercup went up to greet him and she hugged him and they talked for a moment. He looked real sad, like he knew what had happened. See, by this time in his life, he was very sick with schizophrenia and he was only a shell of his former self. She brought him back over to where we were all sitting. Man, everyone was just embarrassed as hell to see him like that, too embarrassed even to say a word, so we just had these weak smiles on our faces, trying to hide what we really felt inside. There was complete silence. Complete. You could have heard a feather hit the floor. Then I just jumped up and went and hugged Bud and told him, “Bud, now you know you shouldn’t be playing when you’ve been drinking like you have; now you know that, don’t you?” I looked at him straight in the eyes and I said this loud enough for everyone to hear. So, he just kind of nodded and smiled that secret, faraway smile that crazy people smile and sat down. Buttercup just stood, almost crying, grateful for what I had done. Then all of a sudden, everybody started talking and everything went back to the way it was before Bud played. But, you know, I couldn’t have just said nothing. Man, he was my friend and one of the greatest piano players who ever lived, until he got beat up and sent to Bellevue. Now he was over there in Paris, in a foreign country, among people who might not have understood what had happened to Bud—and maybe didn’t care—and thought he might have been just a drunken bum. That was a sad sight, man, seeing and hearing Bud like that. I’ll never forget it as long as I live. Philly Joe was a bitch. If he’d been a lawyer and white, he would have been president of the United States, because in order to get there you gotta talk fast and carry a lot of bullshit with you. Philly had it all and a lot to spare. During the final two weeks at the Cafe Bohemia, before I fired Trane and Philly Joe, something happened that I still remember clearly, Kenny Dorham, the trumpet player, came in one night and asked me if he could sit in with the band. Kenny was a hell of a trumpet player—great style, all his own. I liked his tone and voice. And he was really creative, imaginative, an artist on that horn. He never got all the credit he deserved. Now, I don’t let just anybody sit in with my band. You’ve got to know how to play, and Kenny could play his ass off. Plus, I had known him a long time. anyway, the place was packed that night like it always was back in those days. After I got through playing, I introduced Kenny, who came up and played just like a motherfucker. Just kicked whatever I had played right out of everyone’s head. So I was mad as hell, because nobody likes for someone to come on their gig and show them up. Jackie McLean was out in the audience and so I went up to him and asked him, “Jackie, what did I sound like?” I know Jackie loves me, and he loves the way I play, so he ain’t going to pull my leg. He looked me straight in the eye and said, “Miles, tonight Kenny is playing so beautiful you sound like an imitation of yourself.” Man, was I pissed when I heard that. I just went home without saying anything to nobody; it was the last set. I thought about that shit, because I’ve got a lot of pride. And when I had looked at Kenny as he was leaving, he had this shit-eating grin on his face and was walking like he was ten feet tall. He knew what had gone down—even if people in the audience didn’t. He knew and I knew what had happened. the next night he came back, just like I figured he would, to try to do it all over again, because he knew that I was playing to the biggest and hippest audience in the city. He asked me if he could sit in again. This time I let him play first and then I went up and just kicked his motherfucking ass. See, the night before I had been trying to play shit like Kenny plays, because I wanted to make him feel comfortable. And he knew that’s what I was doing. But I came back on his ass the next night and he didn’t even know what hit him. (Later, in the 1960s, in San Francisco, the same thing happened again, and that one ended in a draw, too, I think.) That’s the way it was back in those days, people always trying to cut you to pieces in a jam session. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, but after you went through it with a great player like Kenny, you had to get something out of that. You had to have picked up something or you weren’t ready to learn about music, even if sometimes it might be an embarrassing situation. He scared me one time while we were in California when he wanted to go to the dentist to get a tooth put in. Trane could play two notes all at once and I thought his missing tooth was the cause of it. I thought it gave him his sound. So when he told me he was going to the dentist to get the tooth put in, I almost panicked. I told him that I had called a rehearsal for the same time that he was going. I asked him if he could postpone his dental appointment. “Naw,” he said, “naw, man, I can’t make the rehearsal; I’m going to the dentist.” I asked him what kind of replacement he was going to get and he says, “A permanent one.” So I try to talk him into getting a removable one that he can take out every night before he plays. He looks at me like I’m crazy. He goes to the dentist and comes back looking like a piano, he was grinning so much. At the gig that night—I think it was at the Blackhawk—I play my first solo and go back by Philly Joe and wait for Trane to play, almost in tears because I know he’s fucked himself up. But when he ripped off them runs like he always did, man, talk about a motherfucker being relieved! That’s the thing, that secret, inner thing that they had. When Bill Evans—we sometimes called him Moe—first got with the band, he was so quiet, man. One day, just to see what he could do, I told him, “Bill, you know what you have to do, don’t you, to be in this band?” He looked at me all puzzled and shit and shook his head and said, “No, Miles, what do I have to do?” I said, “Bill, now you know we all brothers and shit and everybody’s in this thing together and so what I came up with for you is that you got to make it with everybody, you know what I mean? You got to fuck the band.” Now, I was kidding, but Bill as real serious, like Trane. He thought about it for fifteen minutes and then came back and told me, “Miles, I thought about what you said and I just can’t do it, I just can’t do that. I’d like to please everyone and make everyone happy here, but I just can’t do that.” I looked at him and smiled and said, “My man!” And then he knew I was teasing.                                 I had just finished doing an Armed Forces Day broadcast, you know, Voice of America and all that bullshit. I had just walked this pretty white girl named Judy out to get a cab. She got in the cab, and I’m standing there in front of Birdland wringing wet because it’s a hot, steaming, muggy night in August. This white policeman comes up to me and tells me to move on. At the time I was doing a lot of boxing and so I thought to myself, I ought to hit this motherfucker because I knew what he was doing. but instead I said, “Move on, for what? I’m working downstairs. That’s my name up there, Miles Davis,” and I pointed to my name on the marquee all up in lights. He said, “I don’t care where you work, I said move on! If you don’t move on I’m going to arrest you.” I just looked at his face real straight and hard, and I didn’t move. Then he said, “You’re under arrest!” He reached for his handcuffs, but he was stepping back. Now, boxers had told me that if a guy’s going to hit you, if you walk toward him you can see what’s happening. I saw by the way he was handling himself that the policeman was an ex-fighter. So I kind of leaned in closer because I wasn’t going to give him no distance so he could hit me on the head. He stumbled, and all his stuff fell on the sidewalk, and I thought to myself, Oh, shit, they’re going to think that I fucked with him or something. I’m waiting for him to put the handcuffs on, because all his stuff is on the ground and shit. Then I move closer so he won’t be able to fuck me up. A crowd had gathered all of a sudden from out of nowhere, and this white detective runs in and BAM! hits me on the head. I never saw him coming. Blood was running down the khaki suit I had on. Then I remember Dorothy Kilgallen coming outside with this horrible look on her face—I had known Dorothy for years and I used to date her good friend, Jean Bock—and saying, “Miles, what happened?” I couldn’t say nothing. Illinois Jacquet was there, too. It was almost a race riot, so the police got scared and hurried up and got my ass out of there and took me to the 54th Precinct where they took pictures of me bleeding and shit. So, I’m sitting there, madder than a motherfucker, right? And they’re saying to me in the station, “So you’re the wiseguy, huh?” Then they’d bump up against me, you know, try to get me mad so they could probably knock me upside my head. I’m just sitting there, taking it all in, watching every move they make. I look up on the wall and see they were advertising voyages for officers to take to Germany, like a tour. And this is about fourteen years after the war. And they’re going to learn police shit. It’s advertised in the brochure; they’ll probably teach them how to be meaner and shit, do to niggers over here what the Nazis did to the Jews over there. I couldn’t believe that shit in there and they’re supposed to be protecting us. I ain’t done nothing but help a woman friend of mine get a cab and she happened to be white and the white boy who was the policeman didn’t like seeing a nigger doing that. I had called my lawyer, Harold Lovett, at about three A.M. The police charged me with resisting arrest, and assault and battery of a police officer. Me! And I ain’t done nothing! It’s so late that Harold can’t really do nothing. They take me downtown to police headquarters and so Harold comes down to Centre Street, where they had me in the morning. It makes the front pages of the New York newspapers, and they repeat the charges in their headlines. There was a picture, which became famous, of me leaving the jail with this bandage all over my head (they had taken me to the hospital to have my head stitched up), and Frances—who had come down to see me when they were transferring me downtown—walking in front of me like a proud stallion. When Frances had come down to that police station and saw me all beat up like that, she was almost hysterical, screaming. I think the policemen started to think that they had made a mistake, a beautiful woman like this screaming over this nigger. And then Dorothy Kilgallen came down and then wrote about it in her column the next day. The piece was very negative against the police, and that was of some help to my cause. Now I would have expected this kind of bullshit about resisting arrest and all back in East St. Louis (before the city went all-black), but not here in New York City, which is supposed to be the slickest, hippest city in the world. But then, again, I was surrounded by white folks and I have learned that when this happens, if you’re black, there is no justice. None. At the hearing, the district attorney said to me, “When the policeman said, ‘You’re under arrest,’ and you looked at him, what did that look mean?” Harold Lovett, my lawyer, said, “What does that mean, ‘What did that look mean?’” What they were trying to say was that I was going to knock the policeman down or something. My lawyers didn’t put me on the witness stand, because they thought that the white judge and white jury would mistake my confidence for arrogance, and because of my bad temper, which they didn’t trust me to keep in check. But that incident changed me forever, made me much more bitter and cynical than I might have been. It took two months for three judges to rule that my arrest had been illegal and dismiss the charges against me. Later I sued the police department for $500,00. Harold wasn’t doing negligence suits, so he got another lawyer, who forgot to file the claim before the statute of limitations ran out. We lost the damage suit, and I was madder than a motherfucker, but there wasn’t nothing I could do about it. The police revoked my cabaret license, and that prevented me from playing New York clubs for a while. My band had played out the last set without me, but the club made an announcement about what had happened. I heard that the band had played their asses off without me, stretching out and playing everything, every tune the way they probably would have played them in their own groups. Cannonball and Coltrane both called off the tunes after I left, so I know the place was popping. But after that shit made the front pages of the New York papers for a couple of days, everything was quiet. A lot of people forget about it in a second. But a lot of musicians and people in the know—black and white—didn’t, and thought I was a hero standing up to the police like I did. Around, the time, people—white people—started saying that I was always “angry,” that I was “racist,” or some silly shit like that. Now, I’ve been racist toward nobody, but that don’t mean I’m going to take shit from a person just because he’s white. I didn’t grin or shuffle and didn’t walk around with my finger up my ass begging for no handout and thinking I was inferior to whites. I was living in America, too, and I was going to try to get everything that was coming to me. I wanted the snare drum to sound like paper tearing, those little tight rolls. Legit drummers can’t solo because they have no musical imagination to improvise. Like mother other classical players, they play only what you put in front of them. That’s what classical music is; the musicians only play what’s there and nothing else. They can remember, and have the ability of robots. In classical music, if one musician isn’t like the other, isn’t all the way a robot, like all the rest, then the other robots make fun of him or her, especially if they’re black. That’s all that is, that’s all the classical music is in terms of the musicians who play it—robot shit. And people celebrate them like they’re great. Now, there’s some great classical music by great classical composters—and there’s some great players up in there, but they have to become soloists—but it’s still robot playing and most of them know it deep down, though they wouldn’t admit it in public. It was on Someday My Prince Will Come that I started demanding that Columbia use black women on my album covers. Next I got rid of all them stupid liner notes, which I had been trying to do for a long time. See, I never thought there was nothing nobody could say about an album of mine. I just want everyone to listen to the music, and make up their own minds. I never did like no one writing about what I played on an album, trying to explain what I was trying to do. The music speaks for itself. Playing with Hank just wasn’t fun for me; he didn’t stimulate my imagination. This was about the time I started playing real short solos and then leaving the bandstand. People were complaining because they were coming to see me play, or do whatever it was they thought I was supposed to do. By now they had made me a “star,” and people were coming just to look at me, to see what I was going to do, what I had on, whether I would say anything or cuss somebody out, like I was some kind of freak in a glass cage at the motherfucking zoo. Man, that shit was getting depressing. I hadn’t seen my mother very often, but when I did, she was something else, man. She never bit her tongue. I remember once when a guy named Marc Crawford was doing a big piece on me for Ebony magazine and I was in Chicago playing the Sutherland Lounge. Marc was sitting at the table with me, my mother, my sister, Dorothy, and her husband, Vincent. My mother said to me, “Miles, you could at least smile for the audience when they’re clapping so hard for you. They’re clapping because they love you, love what you are playing because it’s beautiful.” I said, “What do you want me to be, an Uncle Tom?” She looked at me real hard for a minute and then she said, “If I ever hear about you tomming, I’ll come and kill you myself.” Well, everybody at the table just sat there, because they knew how she was. But Marc Crawford’s eyes got bigger than oranges. He didn’t know whether to write that down or not. just as we were about to leave to go to Kansas City, he gave me a letter. I just gave it to Frances and hugged him and left. I forgot about the letter. Then about three days later we were playing in Kansas City and J. J. comes up to me and says, “You better sit down.” I looked at him and ask, “What the fuck for, what you gotta tell me?” But I can tell something’s funny by the way he’s looking at me, all sad. So I sit down, feeling a little scared. “Your father just died, man. They just called the club and told the owner; your father just died.” I just looked at him, shocked, and I said, “No shit! Aw goddamn! Man!” I’ll never forget it. I just said, “No shit!” I don’t know what it did to me; I wasn’t crying or nothing. I was just kind of numb, probably in a state of disbelief. Then I remembered the letter. I went right back to the hotel room and asked Frances for it. It said, “A few days after you read this I’ll be dead, so take care of yourself, Miles. I truly loved you, and you made me proud. “ Man, that just fucked me up. I cried, cried hard, man, real hard and long. I was mad at myself for forgetting to read the letter until then. I felt real bad, real guilty. I was frustrated—so fucking frustrated, you wouldn’t believe—for not being able to help my father when he was sick after all those times he had helped me. And I could see how sick he was from his handwriting because it was so shaky and uneven. I just read the letter over and over and over again, and then I read it some more and I kept it. He was sixty years old when he died. I thought he was going to live forever, because he was always there for me. I knew that I had had a great father, I mean a great one, and he had to be a bad motherfucker to tell me he was going to die like that. I didn’t think he had looked good when I saw him, and after I thought back over the last visit—going back over every image I could remember of him—I remember him having that certain look that people—spiritual, country people—have in their eyes when something is very wrong. He had that look when I was saying goodbye, that sad look of “I probably won’t be seeing you any more” in his eyes. But I didn’t get it. And knowing that made me feel even sadder, even guiltier, that I had let my father down at the one time that he needed me most. If I had only been paying attention! I had seen that look before, many times, like in the eyes of Bird the last time I saw him, and others. Before the last session for Quiet Nights in November, I finally agreed to do an interview for Playboy magazine. Marc Crawford, who had written the story on me for Ebony, introduced me to Alex Haley, who wanted to do the interview. I didn’t want to do it at first. So Alex said, “Why?” I told him, “It’s a magazine for whites. white people usually ask you questions just to get inside your mind, to see what you’re thinking. and then after that, they don’t want to give you credit for thinking what you told them, what they asked you about.” Then I told him that another reason that I didn’t want to do it was because Playboy didn’t have black or brown or Asian women in there.” “All they have,” I told him, “are blond women with big tits and flat asses or no asses. So who the fuck wants to see that all the time? Black guys like big asses, you know, and we like to kiss on the mouth and white women don’t have no mouths to kiss on.” Alex talked to me and went to the gym with me and even got in the ring with me and took a few punches upside his head. That impressed me. So I told him, “Listen, man, if I tell you all this, why don’t they make me part of the company for giving you all this information they want me to give you?” He said that he couldn’t do that. So I told him if they would give him $2,500 for the interview, then I’d do it. They agreed and that’s how they got the interview. But I didn’t like what he did with the interview. Alex made up some things, although it was good reading. In the piece he talked about how the little colored trumpet player—me—always lost out to the white trumpet player then they were picking the best trumpet player in Illinois. This was when I was in high school in a competition for the All State Music Band. And Alex wrote that I always felt bad about that. Fuck that shit! It wasn’t true. I might have lost but I didn’t feel bad because I knew I was a bad motherfucker and so did the white boy. Where’s his ass at now anyway? I didn’t like that Alex dressed shit up. Alex is a good writer but he’s very dramatic. I knew later why he was doing it, that’s just the way he writes, but I didn’t know it before he did that piece on me. When we first met, she would say these certain words and I would say something so she would have to say it again. She’s give me that knowing look because she knew I wanted her to say it again so I could see her mouth pout. People don’t ever see that look in movies. She hides it and doesn’t do it when she’s acting. It was a look that I don’t think anyone ever saw but me—at least that’s what she told me. Coltrane was their symbol, their pride—their beautiful, black, revolutionary pride. I had been it a few years back, now he was it, and that was cool with me. It was this way for many intellectual and revolutionary whites and Asians as well. Even his change to a more spiritual music in the music on A Love Supreme—which was like a prayer—reached out and influenced those people who were into peace, hippies and people like that. I heard he played a lot of love-ins, which becoming the rage all over California for a lot of whites. So he was reaching different groups of people, too. His music was embraced by a lot of different kinds of people, and that was beautiful and I was proud of him, even if I liked his earlier music more. He once told me that even he liked some of the music he did earlier better than what he was doing now. But Trane was on a search, and his course kept taking him farther and farther out; he couldn’t turn back even though I think he wanted to. Some people have written that doing Bitches Brew was Clive Davis’s or Teo Macero’s idea. That’s a lie, because they didn’t have nothing to do with none of it. Again, it was white people trying to give some credit ot other white people where it wasn’t deserved because the record became a breakthrough concept, very innovative. They were going to rewrite history after the fact like they always do. What we did on Bitches Brew you couldn’t ever write down for an orchestra to play. That’s why I didn’t write it all out, not because I didn’t know what I wanted; I knew that what I wanted would come out of a process and not some prearranged shit. This session was about improvisation, and that’s what makes jazz so fabulous. Any time the weather changes it’s going to change your whole attitude about something, and so a musician will play differently, especially if everything is not put in front of him. A musician’s attitude is the music he plays. Like in California, out by the beach, you have silence and the sound of waves crashing against the shore. In New York you’re dealing with the sounds of cars honking their horns and people on the street running their mouths and shit like that. Hardly ever in California do you hear people talking on the streets. California is mellow, it’s about sunshine and exercise and beautiful women on the beaches showing off their bad-ass bodies and fine, long legs. People there have color in their skin because they go out in the sun all the time. People in New York go out but it’s a different thing, it’s an inside thing. California is an outside thing and the music that comes out of there reflects that open space and freeways, shit you don’t hear in music that comes out of New York, which is usually more intense and energetic. On this last night, I do the same thing. When I get there I see that Bill is madder than a motherfucker because he’s not waiting for me inside like he normally does, but he’s standing outside the Fillmore. He starts to cut into me with this bullshit about “disrespective Steve” and everything. So I just look at him, cool as a motherfucker, and say to him, “Hey, baby, just like the other nights and you know they worked out just fine, right?” So he couldn’t say nothing to that because we had torn the place down. After this gig, or somewhere around this time, I started realizing that most rock musicians didn’t know anything about music. They didn’t study it, couldn’t play different styles—and don’t even talk about reading music. But they were popular and sold a lot of records because they were giving the public a certain sound, what they wanted to hear. So I figured if they could do it—reach all those people and sell all those records without really knowing what they were doing—then I could do it, too, only better. Again, the reason that they stopped and came back was because I was sitting in my red Ferrari, dressed in a turban, cobra-skinned pants, and a sheepskin coat, with a real fine woman—I think it was Marguerite, again—outside the Plaza Hotel. I had another run-in with the police that July because of an argument I had had with one of my tenants, a white woman. She had gotten into an argument with Jackie Battle, and I had just told her to mind her own fucking business. things got loud and the police came and arrested me on my own property. If the woman had bene black, nothing else would have been said. She was the one who started all the shit by yelling at everybody. The police said that I hit her but they couldn’t find no evidence of that so they had to let me go. Later the woman apologized to me for causing me all those problems. But if you’re a black man in this country and you get into it with a white woman, ain’t no way you can win most of the time and that’s a shame. They ought to pick more fair-minded people to be police officers, because the job’s too important to have any kind of racist white person walking around with a gun a license to kill. That incident reminded me of the time when I first moved into the house on West 77th Street and this white guy, who I had hired to do some work on the house, asked me when I answered the door, “Where is the owner?” Now I’m standing there all clean and shit and he’s asking if he can see the owner. He just refused to believe a black person could own a house like that in that particular neighborhood. If you’re black you get it in all kinds of ways. I got into some controversy with the Grammy Awards people in 1971 by saying that most of the awards went to white people copying black people’s shit, sorry-assed imitations rather than the real music. I said we ought to give out Mammy Awards to black artists. Give the musicians their awards and then have them tear them up right on television. Live. I hated the way they were treating black musicians by giving all the Grammys to white guys acting like black guys. That shit is tired and sickening, but they get mad if you say something about it. You’re just supposed to let them take your shit, grit your teeth, but don’t get mad and just bear the pain while they make all the money and all the glory. It’s strange the way many white people think. Strange and deadly. After a while, all that fucking ain’t nothing but tits and asses and pussy. All the record companies were interested in at that time was making a lot of money and keeping their so-called black stars on the music plantation so that their white stars could just rip us off. All that just made me sicker than I was physically, made me sick spiritually, and so I just dropped out. Another interesting experience I had in 1986 was that I did an episode of “Miami Vice,” playing a pump a dope dealer. When I did that role, someone asked me how I felt acting and I told the, “You’re acting all the time when you’re black.” And it’s true. Black people are acting out roles every day in this country just to keep on getting by. If white people really knew what was on most black people’s minds it would scare them to death. Blacks don’t have the power to say these things, so they put on masks and do great acting jobs just to get through the fucking day. I also did a Honda commercial, and that one commercial got me more recognition than anything else I have ever done. After I did “Miami Vice” and that Honda commercial, people who hadn’t ever heard of me started speaking to me on the streets, black and white and Puerto Rican and Asian kids, people who didn’t even know what I did, started speaking tome after I did those things. Man, now ain’t that a bitch. After you make all this music, please all these people with your playing, and are known all over the world, you find out that all it takes is one commercial to put you over the top in people’s minds. All you’ve got to do in this country today is just be on television and you’re more known and respected than anyone who paints a great painting or creates great music or writes a great book or is a great dancer. People were already calling me “Mr. Tyson,” or saying, “I know who you are. You’re that guy who’s married to Cicely Tyson!” And they would be sincere when they said that. It taught me that a bad, untalented person who is on television or in the movies can be more recognized and respected than a genius who doesn’t appear on the screen. First we had dinner at the White House with the President and the Secretary of State, George Shultz. When I met the President I wished him good luck in trying to do what he was doing, and he said, "Thanks, Miles, because I'm going to need it." He's a nice enough guy when you meet him in person. I guess he was doing the best he could. He's a politician, man, who happens to lean to the right. Others lean to the left. Most of them politicians are stealing the country blind. It don't matter whether they are Republicans or Democrats; they are all in it for what they can take. The politicians don't care anymore about the American people. All they think about is how they're going to get rich just like everybody else who is greedy. Reagan was nice to us, respectful and everything. But Nancy is the one who has the charm between those two. She seemed like a warm person. She greeted me warmly and I kissed her hand. She liked that. Then we met Vice President Bush and his wife and I didn't kiss her hand. When Cicely asked me why I didn't kiss Barbara Bush's hand, I told her that I thought she was George's mother. Cicely looked at me like she thought I was crazy. But I don't know those people, don't keep up with them, and they don't know me either. Cicely keeps up with that kind of shit and it's important to her, but not me. Hell, here these people are giving a lifetime award to Ray Charles, and most of them didn't even know who he was. On the way to the dinner at the White House I rode in a limousine with Willie Mays. Me and Willie and Cicely and Fred Astaire's widow and Fred MacMurray and his wife, I think. When we got into the car, one of them white women said, "Miles, the limo driver says he likes the way you sing and he's got all your records." Right away I was mad, so I looked at Cicely and say under my breath, "Cicely, why you bring me down here to get insulted like this?" She didn't say nothing and just looked straight ahead with that plastic grin on her face. Billy Dee Williams was also in the car with us, so Billy, Willie, and me started having some fun by talking that black shit that black men talk, you know. But this was embarrassing Cicely. Fred MacMurray's sitting in the front of the limo and he's real sick, almost can't walk. The two white women are in the back with us, right? So one of them turns to me and says, "Miles, I know your mammy's proud of you coming down to meet the President." Everything in the car got quiet, real quiet. I know everybody was thinking to themselves, of all the motherfuckers to say this to, why did she say this to Miles? They were just waiting for me to go off on this old-ass broad. I turned to her and said, "Listen, my mother ain't no motherfucking mammy, you hear what I'm telling you! That word is out of style and people don't use it anymore. My mother was more elegant and proper than you could ever be, and my father was a doctor. So don't you ever say anything like that to a black person anymore, you hear what I'm saying to you?" When I was telling her this, I never did raise my voice one time. But she knew what I was saying because I was looking her in her fucking eyes and if looks could have killed she would have been dead. She got the message and apologized. After that I was silent. I'm dressed in the Japanese designer Kohshin Satoh's hip, long black waistcoat with tails. It had this red snake on the back trimmed in white sequins. I also had on two vests made by Kohshin, one red and the other white broadcloth, and I had silver chains crossing this, and some shiny black leather pants. When I went to the toilet to pee, everybody else is lined up with all the same old shit on, so they couldn't stand me. But one guy told me that he loved my outfit and asked "Who did it for you?" I told him, and he walked away pleased, but the rest of them uptight white men were madder than hell. At the table where I was sitting, a politician's wife said some silly shit about jazz, like "Are we supporting this art form just because it's from here in this country, and is it art in its truest form, or are we just being blasé and ignoring jazz because it comes from here and not from Europe, and it comes from black people?" This came from out of the blue. I don't like questions like that because they're just questions from someone who's trying to sound intelligent, when in fact they don't give a damn about it. I looked at her and said, "What is it? Jazz time or something? Why you ask me some shit like that?" So she said, "Well, you're a jazz musician, aren't you?" So I said, "I'm a musician, that's all." "Well, then, you're a musician, you play music." "Do you really want to know why jazz music isn't given the credit in this country?" She said, "Yes, I do." "Jazz is ignored here because the white man likes to win everything. White people like to see other white people win just like you do and they can't win when it comes to jazz and the blues because black people created this. And so when we play in Europe, white people over there appreciate us because they know who did what and they will admit it. But most white Americans won't." She looked at me and turned all red and shit, then she said, "Well, what have you done that's so important in your life? Why are you here?" Now, I just hate shit like this coming from someone who is ignorant, but who wants to be hip and has forced you into a situation where you're talking to them in this manner. She brought this on herself. So then I said, "Well, I've changed music five or six times, so I guess that's what I've done and I guess I don't believe in playing just white compositions." I looked at her real cold and said, "Now, tell me what have you done of any importance other than be white, and that ain't important to me, so tell me what your claim to fame is?" She started to twitch and everything around her mouth. She couldn't even talk she was so mad. There was a silence so thick you could cut it with a knife. Here this woman was supposedly from the hippest echelons of society talking like a fool. Man, it was depressing. Ray Charles was up there sitting with the President, and the President was looking around to see how to act. I felt sorry for him. Reagan just looked embarrassed. That was some of the sorriest shit I've ever been around. That was a hell of a feeling I had down there in Washington, feeling embarrassed because those white people down there who are running the country don't understand nothing about black people and don't want to know! It was sickening to be put in a position where you've got to teach dumbass white people who really don't want to know in the first place, but feel obligated to ask them silly questions. Why should some motherfucker make me feel bad because of their ignorance? They can go to a store and buy a record of people they're honoring and inviting down. They could read a book and learn something. But that's too much like giving us the respect we deserve. They stay stupid and make me and a lot of other black people feel bad because of their ignorance. And the President sitting up there and don't know what to say. Man, they should have written down something hip for him to say, but they ain't got nobody hip nowhere around him. Just a bunch of sorry motherfuckers with plastic smiles, acting all proper and shit. When we left, I told Cicely, "Don't you ever as long as you fucking live bring me to no more of this shit, make me feel sad for white folks. I'd rather have my heart fail doing some other shit than I would have it fail doing some sorry shit like this. Let me run my Ferrari into a bus or something." "Well, Miles, you could at least let him play here because of all his friends; it's going to be embarrassing for him." "Dorothy, music don't have friends like that. They both are motherfuckers, but I like Prince a little better as an all-around musical force. Plus he plays his ass off as well as sings and writes. He's got that church thing up in what he does. He plays guitar and piano and plays them very well. But it's the church thing that I hear in his music that makes him special, and that organ thing. It's a black thing and not a white thing. Prince is like the church to gay guys. He's the music of the people who go out after ten or eleven at night. He comes in on the beat and plays on top of the beat. I think when Prince makes love he hears drums instead of Ravel. So he's not a white guy. Another wonderful thing that happened to me in 1988 was that on November 13 at the Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain, I was knighted and inducted into The Knights of Malta—or to use their formal name, The Knights of the Grand Cross in and for the Sovereign Military Hospitaler Order of St. John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta. I was inducted along with three Africans and a doctor from Portugal. I have to admit that I don't know what all those words in the order's name actually mean, but I'm told that as a member I can get into thirty or forty countries without a visa. I was also told that I was chosen for this honor because I have class, because I'm a genius. The only thing they asked of me is not to be prejudiced against any person and to continue to do what I do, which is contributing to the only worldwide cultural contribution to come out of America—jazz, or as I prefer to call it, black music. I remember one time when Milton Berle, the comedian, came down to see me when I was playing at the Three Deuces. I was in Bird's band at the time. I think this was in 1948. Anyway, Berle was sitting at a table listening to us and somebody asked him what he thought of the band and the music. He laughed and turned to this group of white people he was with and said that we were "headhunters," meaning we were fucking savages. He thought it was funny, and I remember all those white people laughing at us. Well, I never forgot that. Then I saw him on an airplane about twenty-five years after that and we were both riding in first class. I went up and introduced myself to him. I said, "Milton, my name is Miles Davis and I'm a musician." He started smiling and said, "Oh, yeah, I know who you are. I really love your music."He seemed happy that I had come up to him. Then I said, "Milton, you did something to me and some people in the band I was playing with some years ago that I've always remembered, and I always told myself that if I ever got close enough to breathe on you that I was gonna tell you the way I felt when you said what you said that night." He was looking at me kind of funny now because he didn't know what he had said. And I could feel some of the anger of that night coming back so it must have been showing in my face. I told him what he said and I told him how they had all laughed at us. Now his face was turning red because he was embarrassed, and he had probably forgotten all about it. So then I told him, "I don't like what you called us that night, Milton, and none of the band liked it either after I told them what you said. Some of them also heard what you said." He looked all pitiful and everything and then he said, "I'm very, very sorry." And I said, "I know you are. But you're only sorry now, sorry after I told you, because you weren't sorry then." And then I turned around and went back to my seat and sat down and didn't say another word to him. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. Some white people and black people, too—will laugh at you one minute and then turn around and say that they love you the next. They do it all the time; try to divide and conquer people with shit like that. But I've got a long memory of what has happened to us in this country. The Jewish people keep reminding the world of what happened to them in Germany. So black people have to keep reminding the world of what happened in the United States, or as James Baldwin once told me, "these yet to be United States." We've got to watch out for those divide-and-conquer techniques that whites have used on us all these years, keeping us apart from out real inner selves and our real inner strength. I know people get tired of hearing it but black people have got to keep saying it, throwing our conditions up into these people's faces until something is done about the way they have treated us. We've just got to keep it in front of their eyes and their ears like the Jews have done. We've got to make them know and understand just how evil the things are that they did to us over all these years and are still doing to us today. We've just got to let them know that we know what they are doing and that we're not going to lighten up until they stop. white people, 4-5, 373 bebop and, 57-58, 109 black financial success envied by, 62 black musical ideas sanitized for, 44, 283 credit for black innovations claimed by, 44-45, 146, 241, 290, 315 as critics, 66, 146, 261-62 as guitar players, 319 jazz ignored by, 370-71 justice denied to black people by, 229 Miles’s confronting of, 394, 395, 396-97 Miles’s hiring of, 107 Miles’s sound accessible to, 109 Mingus and, 155-56 world survival threatened by, 352 PRICE POINTS On a traffic island, a man waves his arms as if conducting music, and takes bows. He gets no points for originality, plus we’re sick of being represented. The tabloids are right. An appearance requires scandal. To be notable, something might appear instead of what? * This spike reflects. * This spike reflects global demand for food products. CURRENCY I stare at the edge until the word tulip comes up where I thought it might. But the lag-time is a problem. The swollen, yellow head of Tweety-Bird now offered at the border as balloon or ceramic, as baby plus crucifixion, as distended incredulity held towards the cars, as silence 3 Viral relics in the genome? Genes that switch themsleves off and on, unthinking but coordinated? 4 Zombie surfeit. Half-off zombie The best zombie imitation. Invisible zombie hand EXCHANGE City of the future in which each subway station’s stairs lead to the ground floor of a casino/mall * What counts is the role defined for each piece by a system of rules saying how it can move, not the stuff the piece is made of. TREATMENT The relationship between a handsome young broker and a lovely young curator is in trouble. Before they can marry, he must come to tolerate, then feel guarded affection for a good natured buffoon who populates dioramas with stuffed mouse couples in period dress, then for an assortment of others, some less likeable, who also take passionate interest in an activity that generates no profit MANUFACTURING 1 A career in vestige management. A dream job back-engineering shifts in salience. I’m so far behind the curve on this. So. Cal. must connect with so-called to manufacture the present. Ubiquity’s the new in-joke bar-code hard-on, a catch-phrase in every segment. 2 The eye asks if the green, frilled geranium puckers, clustered at angles on each stem, are similar enough to stop time. It has asked this question already. How much present tense can any resemblance make. What if one catch-phrase appears in every episode? Does the language go rigid? The new in-joke is a pun pretending to be a bridge. COMING OUT 1 The Alphas, The Incredibles, The X-Men, characters with freak abilities, are being suppressed, regulated, in the name of society, until, finally, they break out, use their power as they please. Now, for “ability” read wealth. 2 Say you’re hiding nothing. Say blood creeps through your skeleton, which is upright, gnarled, brown, and hung with a thousand clean slates 3 Let’s not rationalize taste! A mound of dark loose dirt with a small hole on top: a pucker FLO 1 In this spot for insurance, a savvy young agent, almost pretty, says “Go Big Money!” to a subordinate tap-dancing in a dollar sign costume in front of her confused/ bemused clients. This agent, Flo, who is above it all but enthusiastic too like the Dalai Lama, has become/ is becoming an American icon. 2 What I first saw as tiny, novel fireplaces scattered about the living room floor, I now see as the house gone up in flames — but this is wrong because “first” was part of “now” from the very start. 2 The static seems jumpy tonight, anxious, randomized, but perhaps not truly random. That’s what worries some of us. Hollywood itself tells us the background is composed of voices speaking from beyond their own annihilation. We ought to be frightened of the reconstituted pronominal fizz that invades us, the wavery, weasely persistence which, once we start to listen, demands to be heard * To punch one’s straw definitely into the fizz. Arms of pastries revolve in their clear cylinder slowly. Space “may be shaped like a saddle,” scientists say. A list may pantomime focus. On conditions so numerous nothing can begin. * “Run down,” they say, “buildings.” Wave of morning glory leaves about to break over the dropped plastic bat, the empty shed. Hard to specify further. Whole body dotted here and there Areas of interest, cross purposes, eddies EASILY The models in the Gentlemen’s Club ad are posed with pink mouths slack, eyes narrowed to slits. Show me stunned resentment - the way the world absorbs an insult it won’t easily forget LIE 1 I lay down the acidification of the ocean with a sly smile. Unstoppable beats fiery impact every time. * But the sweet yellow shoulders of the road - the up and up into same blossom. I’d like to hold these in reserve. 2 “Protect your identity” says Mileage.com three times today as if it knew something. I may want to fly cheap, cruise in luxury, buy a walk-in-tub and burial insurance. * I may want to lie still and think about my choices. Results 1 Click here to vote on who’s ripe for a makeover or takeover in this series pilot. Votes are registered at the server and sent back as results. 2 Click here to transform oxidation into digestion. From this point on, it’s a lattice of ends disguised as means: the strangler fig, the anteater. 3 I’ve developed the ability to revise what I’m waiting for so that letter becomes dinner gradually while the contrapuntal nodding of the Chinese elm leaves redistributes ennui 2 Let’s see your itty- bitten specificity fetish, your mom’s phantasmic what’s-it held conspicuously under threat. Day hoists its mesh of near approximations, (its bright skein of pres.) Eyes fetch thrown shadows Vehicles Paired matched fragments, then pausing — archly? —— Mozard creates a universe out of pleasantries. “How is everything for you today?” the hostess at the front desk asks. * If that (head-on car-crash) had happened, we say, all this would not have been — like “having been” were a lasting thing: the small tree on the highway meridian having been lit up for a moment now by sun breaking through cloud * Look how we “attempted to express ourselves.” Every one of these words is wrong. It wasn’t us. Or we made no real attempt. Or there is no discernible difference between self and expression. * What was meant by “streamlining” we might guess, but what was meant by streamlining as value added to this already bulky, even bulbous, baby-pink conveyance, we can only ask       A Resemblance As a word is mostly connotation, mater is mostly aura? Halo? (The same loneliness that separates me from what I call “the world.”) * Quiet, ragged skirt of dust encircling a ceramic gourd. * Look-alikes. “Are you happy now?” * Would I like a vicarious happiness? Yes! Though I suspect yours of being defective, forced Removal activates glamour? The outer world means State Farm Donuts Tae Kwando? Thoughts as spent fuel rods. Preceded and followed by statuesque shadows of cacti on a lawn. Today could be described as a retired man humming tunelessly to himself. When I ask what you’re thinking, you say “about ex- plaining to children the best way to build a Maypole.” Relations “Head” and “Bring.” I remember the words. “Bobble” and “Bauble.” “Rosy” and “Lonely” set off now. What will you little chimes bring me? Time flows because no set of proofs can be complete. Bring me the friendship between solving and dissolving. Operations This child fights cancer with the help of her celebrity fan club, says, “Now I know how hard it is to be a movie star.” * “Hey, my avatar’s not working!” * This small hawk on a wire above tangled flowers. * Speech, too, was thought to be inhabited by a god. Then hunger invented light. A space “inside” can’t bear to be un- interrupted. I mark it: “I” “I” “I” Guess 1 The jacaranda, for instance is beautiful but not serious. That much I can guess. And that the view is softened by curtains. That the present moment is an exception, is the queen bee a hive serves, or else an orphan. 2 So the jacaranda is foreign and extravagant. It gestures in the distance. Between there and here you ask what game we should play next week. So we’ll be alive next week, continuing what you may or may not mean to be an impossible flirtation Locality 1 “Is it nummy? Yeah, huh?” 2 Songs as empathy evacuation engines. It’s not that I wish to pledge slavish devotion as the singer seems to do; it’s not that I want to be the object of such attention — but I’ll listen to this song again and again. 3 Where you put them — did you, for instance, those window bars reflected in sun glasses upside down between remotes? 4 Wires dip obligingly between blanched poles, slightly askew. Any statement I issue, if particular enough, will prove I was here Amplification Some think in the first days Hunger and Lust arose separately and then paired up by chance having only self-love in common — and what is that? Still, what a pair they’ve been! * Some think we can achieve escape velocity if only we can make o our thoughts bounce harder and harder off the near walls — the limits — of what is known, what is trite about these characters. * We have it on good authority that we’re dying to express this one thousand times more or less precisely, dying to practice Bonding On the television in an empty pharmacy, the contestant whose guess is closest to retail squeals. * A want, conceived as illusory (rhetorical), is said to underlie the real, underwrite matter. * A man tells a camera he prefers “lady-boys” because they can’t fake orgasm. * In the updraft, the particulate glitz is beside itself. * Check-plus! I wait for my thought to reappear. (I trust recognitions.) * Pathos of strangers’ headlights tracing the curve at dusk is inexplicable Scumble What if I were turned on by seemingly innocent words such as “scumble,” “pinky,” or “extrapolate?” What if I maneuvered conversation in the hope that others would pronounce these words? Perhaps the excitement would come from the way the other person touched them lightly and carelessly with his tongue. What if “of” were such a hot button? “Scumble of bushes.” What if there were a hidden pleasure in calling one thing by another’s name?                 God as the lace-making machine, the hypnotized spider. Why shouldn’t an idée fixe be infinite? Blithering symmetries. More of you are coming. * “I think our incentives are sexy and edgy.” * As if you could become another person by setting off an automatic cascade of responses in his/her body. As if you could escape by following the path you carved there to its prescribed end. * Poems addressed to their own dead letters — campy femme-fatales. Poems addressed to their end-times’ desiccation. Entropy increases as I recall less and less of the number string. Snackle-crackle of strings breaking — that radiation hiss evening things out. * Look — I’m cooperating! I can pull myself apart and still speak     Either Side Proscenium of nearly identical mountain ridges, arced out and downward, one “after” another, to the valley floor: curtains tied back, a gesture * Skin falling into pleats around my lower jaw as my head bends forward * Glassy, copper inlets leading “off” into mist between pairs, sets of small, long-treed islands make gorgeous — because empty? — promises * The short moan — or hum? — you exhale as you drift toward sleep is an island I can’t visit Presto “Breaking Anna Nicole news as she buries her son.” * “What do you want to be?” Skeleton suits and Superman outfits — inappropriate touching on drugstore racks. * Presto! Pairs of flies re-tie the old knot mid-air. * Blonde wigs and wizard caps. “I want to go back!” Invisible knot. I want to be that! New If yellow is the new black, the new you is a cartoon spokesman who blows his lines around bumptious 3-D Hondas, apologizes often, and remains cheerful. * The new pop song is about getting real: “you had a bad day. The camera don’t lie.” But they’re lying to you about the camera. * Since Fallujah is the new Antigua, sunlight nibbles on pre- charred terrain in the electric fireplace. “Imaginary” meaning “seen by humans.” Lengths 1 Evening succeeds evening. Demons discourse on familiar topics. They describe a wraith’s response to a description. “I think he was signaling.” One night differs from all other nights through their deployment of synonyms. “Craft a way forward.” “Get out ahead of this with his plan.” 2 Aren’t you exhausted, you green spear, you peel-back purple? All divided column, all split hair, mirrored and re- counted for. You’ve been crossing every with only, going to any mandible or bud Just A confidential twinkle from the spun bead or leaf seen by everyone “through all eternity” — though “now” is always just beginning. * I’m composed largely of what the streets and rooms look like, of how to arrive just here (Heaven as default position.) Tiny, intense, multiple clusters of purple verbena Later 1 To be beautiful and powerful enough for someone to want to break me up into syndicated ripples. Later I’ll try to rise from these dead. 2 How much would this body have had to be otherwise in order not to be mine, for this world not to exist? When would that difference have had to begin? 3 The old lady invited me to her soirée. Maybe I was even older than she was. I was mysterious, at any rate, a rarity, until the room filled up. Then not. When she handed out chocolates, she forgot me. I gesticulated as if it were funny and she gave me two pink creams. Me! As if I would have ever wanted these! 4 They drive me out to sea. Secretly, I am still _____, the mysterious. I speak in splashes. Later I have the lonely dream Own Woman in a room near mine moans, “I’m dying. I want to be fine. It’s my body! Don’t let me! Don’t touch me” * By definition, I’m the blip floating across my own “field of vision . .” * On closed eyes I see the spartan wall of the ICU covered in a screambled hodge-podge of sticky notes, crossing one another at all angles, illegibly written over, snippets of reference, madly irrelevant. * Symbolism as the party face of paranoia. Chorus of expert voices beyond my door, forever dissecting my case. “But the part is sick of representing the whole.” * “We will prevail,” says the leader on multiple screens. The words are empty, but he’s there inside the lie everyone believes — that nothing will really change. He’s become pure being, insisting only on insistence. * A crowd (scene) of cells, growing wildly, by random access to stock types, (Play any role you like and go on forever. Who is speaking?) Able to draw blood vessels to itself by emitting a mock distress call. * From deep time, patterns on my grandmother’s crockery rise to cover my closed eyelids, lumpy fruits and flowers, brown against a cream background. * Dream that Aaron is telling friends to be quiet because he’s listening to a rumble, a white noise voice from his own intestines which he believes is telling him how to save me. “SHH!” he says to anyone who speaks. Around Time is pleased to draw itself out, permit itself pendulous loops, to allow them meaning, this meaning, as it goes along. * Chuck and I are pleased to have found a spot where my ashes can be scattered. It looks like a construction site now but it’s adjacent to a breathtaking, rocky coast. Chuck sees places where he might snorkel. We’re being shown through by a sort of realtor. We’re interested but can’t get her to fix the price. * “The future is all around us.” It’s a place, anyplace where we don’t exist. Simple for Aaron Korkegian Complex systems can arise from simple rules. It’s not that we want to survive, it’s that we’ve been drugged and made to act as if we do while al the while the sea breaks and rolls, painlessly, under. If we’re not copying it, we’re lonely. Is this the knowledge that demands to be passed down? Time is made from swatches of heaven and hell. If we’re not killing it, we’re hungry. Resounding Are you still interested in the image of this island as a brown shoulder or breast half-hidden by clouds? Are you turned on by chimeras? The impossible woman, part igneous, part surge. * Go be embedded, beaded, pebbled. The fickle luster. That’s right. The fretwork of disaster. Go on be half shrouded by The Racket 1 It’s as if the real thing — your own absence — can never be uncovered. 2 Each actor’s face seems to have survived the same brave battle to remain in character. They’re posed on the rubble used to indicate the past. It turns out this is heaven. 3 In the present cancer sets up a free market in your gut. The fog lifts and the birds start in. Each works to replace itself with a bit of racket. Provenance It’s characteristic of X to place his anxiety here between “time” and “alive.” What can you give me for this glimpse and its provenance? I’ve got one just like it. What interests me now are spin-offs of spin-offs. The narrative that rescues us once more in a less probable way. By sailing upside down at dusk we’ve returned from the land of the dead. Previews AMERICA The playboy scion of a weapons company repents. His company, he sees now, is corrupt, his weapons being sold (behind his back) to strong men. Alone, he builds a super weapon in the shape of a man. Now, more power- ful and more innocent than ever before, he attacks. HAPPENING The train halts. An engineer tells us we’re stopped be- cause we’ve lost touch with the outside world. Things are happening ahead, but we don’t know what they are. This could represent an act of war. We stand in a field, no longer passengers. Hey 1 Sound may be addressed to you or it may not. 2 A receipt, blown crazily across the parking lot, was, perhaps, a moth Concentrate The point at which you can get your eyelids to drift, tethered, like seaweed, by thinking about it. Then imagine yourself eyeless. * The spontaneity with which a bubble breaks away, flies to the surface and pops as if finding something out. * Now in a vacuum with virtuals as probes or as little alarms going off Minimum Sum 1 Something like a frilly tube worm launched what I want to call a satellite into what I want to say was “space” to make it sound familiar. 2 Undertone means something’s in the room, a blur of movement. Stand still. 3 Let’s pull back from stipulation to stipple. Have done. One of many dull aches. Once. Lasting 1 Now light sits in the chairs, limns the wooden filigree milled to indicate leisure. Perfect molecules of plastic sheet the seas. 2 When I remember my mother, I remember her fears. But in the photograph, she leans on a pillar hands in pockets, head cocked, slightly amused. Remaining 1 It might be 1976, “Hotel California” is on every sound system. It tells us we’re jaded — which is oddly terrific. This isn’t going to take long at all. “Been there, done that,” we will soon say. Tried to find the door. Futility features a soaring solo. 2 My parents are calling. “I Love Lucy” is about to start. It’s funny the way Lucy wants to go too, do what Desi does. She wheedles her schemes. Her efforts, however, are not as impressive as Wile. E. Coyote’s. When he fails, human ingenuity is foiled. Now Lucy is getting a laugh. She and Little Ricky can’t open the door. Still Once we believed the bees, moving as attention does, settling and lifting from blue identicals, were the picture of eternity. * Practiced hands knitting, hole by hole, a great, shapeless scarf. Mind on something else. * A scarf? Something intensive seen from afar. Something long Pass Single cells become like-minded, forming a consensus or quorum. Bioluminescence and virulence are two ways we describe the feeling they share then. With effort, humans can approach this condition. “Synchronized swimming has afforded me a wonderful life,” says one informant. Why not? I too would like to exert power over time, to pass it, aggressively, dramatically, and forget all about it until even the meaning of the word “pass” gets lost in a rosy glow.