Jass, the original musical form in America

                                 The King


Buddy Bolden's soul expanding

                                        and exploding in

                  on itself

                          from the hot streets of New Orleans.

Buddy Bolden is the reputed originator of jass, his horn heard in the air across the streets of New Orleans, a legend in his time.  If you know the heat of jass, jazz, in those days, you will understand this piece.  Buddy ended up in an asylum, probably from giving so much of himself in his life art.  The sacrifice of creative person, as he or she dives into creative source to return with the life force.

I wrote "The Pain" on the spur of the moment.

I'm uncertain, of course, if it's complete.

I'll reread it in a while, probably
more than once, to see
if I should make changes
or not.

The pain

Still, the pain exists
although I am not
hurt.

She died,
she was hurt.

She is gone.

Still the pain exists.

I am hurt.

I write.  I create.

At four, as a boy, I was able to put off complete psychological encompassment of death by creating.  First, with visual creation, as a child and a youth.  Then, began the writing as a youth, with creating following, which minimized the fear of death, the real grip of death.

At my age, with the death of my wife, creative activity is not yet able to effectively deal with her death, death close, real, in my mind, my self.

I create in short sentences seeking control in those sentences.

One sentence will do.

At the death of my wife, I now have more questions about life, larger, more difficult, than those which I had as a youth.  These involve more pain than the questions of my youth.

There is a difference with these questions, however.

I am not only questioning society, my parents, my teachers, my direction, but I am also questioning myself and my wife, and the nature of life with the reality that death has added.

As a child of four, I learned I would die from a simple accident that was not life threatening, and fear was injected into my understanding of life as a force that could not be ignored.

I lived from that day with fear, fears, brought on by the existential situation that we humans are faced with, relying only on my own intellect and intuition to deal with it.

I return.

In the beginning...

I had questions about life that grew in my mind.  Then I began to write the questions in pocket notebooks.  This was the beginning of my change from visual art to literary art.