Skip to main content

Dennis Mahagin

How To Make It w/ a ‘62 Reissue Japanese Fretless Jazz Bass

Plug her in
easy, easy, yet
with deliberate
reverence, there’s a click halfway
between shove
and pluck, just above a patch
of hum, and the stick… to love  
her you must play
some natural now lick the tip
of your paisley diamond
hard McCartney
plectrum,
then whip it
away.

Keep the EQ
flat, but push volume
between nine or
ten; don’t think about
the Mongoloid prodigy
banjo boy from
Deliverance,
his ghoulish sockets,
hootenanny
whites under iris, shameful
dungarees cum
doom,
and neither go near
the line
from Don Henley’s
Sunset Grille, your talent
isn’t there, and maybe
never, yet still
possessed
of enough heart
for foreplay, vibrato
and the effort
that kills…
hammer on, tremolo,
trill… pull off
a thing between the tongue
and teeth, the ninth
and thirteenth
phantom frets, so little
time left, as your wind
moans the lip
of a bottle, oh Yanni,
get you some, only the first 
sweet good note in years,
a couple more measures

and she’s begging for it,
under a firm growl
and meanness, the keening
between howls…
don’t think about poor Jaco
Pastorius, mad virtuoso
beaten down bloodied unto
death in a south Florida
alley,
but all the keys
you want to play in
still… and maybe
a touch
out of reach, but you will
go up
the neck as she makes
the sound to break hearts
of unreasonable men, art hangs
via balance, you tell the self
Kamasutra legato funk
in the moment
that never was
you, splitting
into two, the billionth harmonic
of every killing effort, multiple
upon multiple upon  
multiple, turn her
down some
son, -- trap
breath within
the slippery damping
and the mute, light years
now, the stunned
meteors will mouth
your prowess, echoes
sustain through
the coming
tears.


Dennis Mahagin is a poet and musician from the Pacific Northwest. He is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection, "Longshot & Ghazal" from Mojave River Press-- which will be available on Kindle, Nook, et al., by summer's end. Dennis is also poetry editor for the online magazine, FRiGG. 


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ed Dorn's # 22 From Twenty-four Love Poems

                                               from Jacket The strengthy message here in #22 of 24 Love Songs can be summed up in two lines: ['There is/no sense to beauty. . .' and '. . .How/ the world is shit/ and I mean all of it] What I also like about this brief poem is the interplay between the title of the book and the subject of the poems (love/anti-love (which is not hate)): it's all a mass of contradictions, like love. And I have to say that the shorter poems of the Love Songs and the last book he wrote before dying (Chemo Sábe) seem to me much better and more memorable than the Slinger/Gunslinger poems. These (generally) later poems probably attempt less stylistically, but are more sure-handed, hacked from a soap bar, maybe. Easy to use, but disappear after use. In any case, Dorn is well worth the reading and re-reading, for me, though he'll never become one of my favorites. And doesn't every poet want that, dead or alive? ;-) #22 The agony

Corey Mesler

  I think of you tonight, my Beats I think of you tonight, my Beats, and I am grateful.  I walked the narrow lanes of Academia and never felt at home. There were men and women in the flowerbeds, their heads full of theorems and poems. There were teachers who could lift their own weight in prose.  I was lonely. I was too loose.  I was a lad from the faraway country of Smarting. But I had you as so many before me. I had you and I knew secret things. I could count on you like a percussion. And now I want to say: I love you.  If not for you, what? I want to say. If Allen Ginsberg did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.  COREY MESLER has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South . He has published over 25 books of fiction and poetry. His newest novel, The Diminishment of Charlie Cain , is from Livingston Press. He also wrote the screenplay for We Go On , which won The Me

David Oliver Cranmer

Not Just Another Playlist Often, I sit in my swivel chair looking out the window, while jazz, country, or rock music plays. This pleasure goes on for many hours a mystic trance of sorts streaming—the glue maintaining my soul. I turn the best songs into playlists (once we called them mix tapes) puzzling over the perfect order. Does Satchmo’s “What a Wonderful World” kick off my latest list or make it the big soulful closer? And does “Mack the Knife” go higher in the set than “Summertime?” That’s an Ella Fitzgerald duet! “Foolishness? No, it’s not” whether you are climbing a tree to count all the leaves or tapping to beats. These are the joys that bring inner peace and balance (to a cold universe) lifting spirits skyward. David Oliver Cranmer ’s poems, short stories, articles, and essays have appeared in publications such as Punk Noir Magazine , The Five-Two: Crime Poetry Weekly , Needle: A Magazine of Noir , LitReactor , Macmillan’s Criminal Element , and