Lines Composed in a downtown Jazz Bar in CHICAGO

I’m sitting in a Jazz bar in Chicago, drinking scotch and beer with scientists.  Doctors have guts from shoveling scotch and pints of suds.  Research must be so fucking dull.  Run the test.  Write it down.  Take a shot.  Rinse, repeat, write the report.  Get fucked up.  The base starts to thump and I think how I want to fuck Whitman.  To be fucked hard by Whitman.  At this moment.  Feel his cock deep in my ass as the Jazz starts up and I want to get drunk on his thick semen and whiskey.

Bar tender has black hair.  Slick as grease but that sheen women pull off that no man can really describe because he doesn’t understand what makes it so.  I order a beer and I think she smiles at me.  I’m married.  I tell myself that, but I’m out of town so I allow myself some adventure.  I watch her pour some drinks.  I study her body and note that she has some up top and an ass worth mentioning.  My wife’s ass is better.  My wife’s ass is the best.  I like to boast about it.    That doesn’t stop me from wanting to think about whether nor not I would like to sleep with her.  I’m out of town and starting to want to get drunk on Jazz and Whitman.  She gets me another Jameson.  I notice two blue stones on her earlobes.  When she comes back with my next beer I compliment her earrings and she comes on to me and I have to pull back.  Jazz is starting to get loud.  She was just being nice.  I’m horny and drunk.  Wanting to be in the moment.

The Doctor laughs at me.  Heavy Polish giant that paints watercolors and hates Wagner.  Wouldn’t shut up about it once we’d left O’Hare airport.  Since we’ve met I’ve wanted nothing but to not fuck up in his eyes and impress the son of a bitch.

—Nice flirting.

—I forgot my wedding ring.

Laughs again.

—I used to forget my wedding ring too.

—I wasn’t—.

But he ain’t listening no more.  He’s listening to the Jazz.  He loves Jazz.

Jazz is supposed to mean something but it doesn’t, it’s just music that another generation of men drunk deep and got fucked up on while plotting out their greatness and writing words on the face of immortality.

Doctor (A real life M.D.PhD, no foolin’) who feels like a potential father figure brought me here.  Shows me his drink and I order one.

Startin’ to feel it.  The Jazz is great but I keep thinking about Whitman.  The name bounces around in my brain and body.  Whitman.  Whitman.  Fucking Whitman.  The saxophone noodles around and I think again about semen dripping from that Barbaric yawper’s beard.  I wonder if Whitman would have liked Jazz.  If he would invite me into his home.  Offer me his bed and blankets and home to me and then I would in turn offer the five pointed star, the gentle rose petal of my anus.  I wonder if he would hear saxophones dancing in that magnanimous jelly brain of his as he sunk his body and penetrated me.   Would he be a gracious lover?  Would he tell me that he loved me as his balls bounced and rubbed against mine and emptied into me?  Would he lie to me and tell me that my poetry was good before he spilled his seed over my chest.  I would hope for more.  I would hope he would pull out and spray that semen over my beard and then I would become the soaked poet he was.

Whitman.  Whitman.  Whitman.  Why am I in love with fucking Whitman?  Cocks grow from stalks of balls.  Ginsberg knew that.[1]  Whitman fucked Ginsberg and gave him greatness, so why am I not blessed with poetry?  Why don’t I taste the Jazz?

I think I read, or think that I thought that I read, or maybe I heard, or maybe I heard that I heard somebody say that Harold Bloom says young gay men have appropriated Whitman so they can have a gay hero, or something like that.  I’m not sure if I agree with that, but I know and understand that men turn their heroes into the kinds of fathers they didn’t have but wanted.  Do gay men make their heroes into fathers?  Do bisexual men turn their heroes into lovers?  There’s another bartender now.  A beefcake with a flat fish face.  I keep trying to listen and write.

Potential Doctor Father figure tells me Basil Haydens.  Bartender hands us the drinks.  Take a sip.  Doctor shows me how to drink Basil Haydens.  Bartender nearby pours two glasses of wine.  Smiles at me again, or maybe I’m just drunk.

—Swirl the ice around, he shows me with the little swizzle straw.  I can’t hear the ice clinking against the glass the Jazz is so tremendous. It helps the drink last longer.

I finish the first one and damn he was right.  The scotch soaks into the ice and I can still taste the taste of damned good scotch and not the usual shit that I chug down because whenever I drink I’m showing off how short it takes to get me drunk.  That taste that tastes that lingers.  The lessons men hand onto their sons who aren’t their sons.

The piano takes over and in this bar in Chicago, that alien territory to a Texas boy, and I feel it.  Start to feel it.  Nice and drunk.  Fucked up.  Feeling glassy drunk but feeling a tremendous sense of waste.

All I am or could be at this moment is a drunk student, a young man, who’s quickly losing that card I tell you, in a bar listening to Jazz calling out Whitman and writing damn near pornography about the man, looking, hoping, for meaning to appear.

I keep writing Whitman’s name over and over on the legal pad hoping the supplication will matter.  That the man will make these words more than just a story about a student getting fucked up in a bar and missing the chance to make something great with words.  Or finding a father in a dead poet or a man who isn’t my father.

I need to come down so I order water.  Bar keep places it in front of me.  Smiles one more time.

Doctor looks at me and my drink while the Jazz kicks up into a new number.  He laughs.

—That stuff will kill ya you know.