Running out of steam: 3 more efforts

These are even less prepossessing than the previous attempts - so I'm presenting them as In Progress , to at least show myself I'm still trying - and I hope I will feel my way into tightening them up in due course. The first, being about a jazz trio (albeit with an ever-changing line-up) uses 3- or 6- word lines as a slight structural discipline.

GIUFFRE, BROOKMEYER, JIM HALL

A valve trombone can also do

the tailgate thing –

and as I write I see

a group in tight black bombazine

suits and inconspicuous

bowler hats they would I believe

call derby

                entertaining

on unpolished brass

genteel white ladies

in a teagarden –

but in Brookmeyer’s hands the instrument

plays smooth as an alto saxophone

The Train and the River running

side by side. The green country

sound of guitar dreams lyrical into

damp shade and lush grass stalks.

“BOTH SIDES - ALL THE SIDES”

a 5-day self-portrait

Day 1

He wanted to be a vagabond,

a swashbuckler, not care

if the hairbrush went in the butter

in the frypan on the shelf, paint

big rangy abstracts, hitch his way

off to Bolivia, to the Pyrenees:

instead he went for security, sat

for thirty years in a job, saw himself

a little grey man in a grey suit

and an invisible pre-sixties bowler hat.

AN EXERCISE FROM PROMPTS, IN PROGRESS

synaesthetic metaphor: just school

fruit: orange excruciating

name from school: hillside library

rhetorical question: newspaper robert

direct address to reader/audience: see attention

foreign word: origato hermanos

game of chance: nutshells chain