My Father’s Years of Coltrane, Miles Davis and Billie Holiday as I Watch from the Stairs

My Father’s Years of Coltrane, Miles Davis and Billie Holiday as I Watch from the Stairs

I stared from those stairs for years 

watching my father sadly suck in that smoke 

Autumn Leaves echoing up into the stairway,

swelling and with each passing moment

leaving, leaving me.

Like a passing stranger’s glance in all its glory

it looms, drunk on power, only to slowly burn out.

Voices of yesterday,

singing from the tombstones across the bridge,

strung from poplar trees,

cry of their troubles.

Like the dead pigeon that lays in the gutter

with its bulging eyes

rooted in hot asphalt, dirt and pebbles,

the music that twists and twists

till I feel nothing.