Mad At Miles

A lot of people say
I treat women shamelessly.
I'm an arrogant S.O.B.,
use my wealth and fame,
good looks and boyish charm
to get my pecker wet.

They say I can't love anyone.
I am too struck on myself,
too in love with the music
to commit to any woman,
let alone be family-focused,
a good husband to one wife.

They want to boycott my music,
make bonfires of my records
cos I call my women bitches
and they come onto me.
They say I slap them silly,
am possessive, moody, mean.

They highlight my bad behavior,
discount all of my good deeds.
They want a bad black man
to be their live evil prince,
their fallen hipster angel,
their badass addict pimp.

They point to the stable of whores
that kept me off the street,
count the holes in my arms
for punctures in my soul.
Think I'm a man deflated
by appetites and jealous rage.

And it is true: I have been mean,
I have been a pimp, an addict,
have done a lot of things
I cannot say I'm proud of.
I've hit women, been buried to the balls
in wall-to-wall booty and cooze.

I've been a boozer, four-time loser.
Have stuck things in my arm,
up my ass. Have had more
finger-lickin' chicken than any
blues-soaked singer ever sang of,
got it whenever, however I could.


Liked it too. And smacked my lips
and put my hips into it the way
any romantic Romeo would, if he could.
And the women whose labia I prized
and pried into loved it too.
It wasn't my trumpet they were after.

I am a man of appetites. I indulge them, true.
But it was the booze and pills,
the coke I took to ease the pain
of my sickle-cell anemia that drove
me to go crazy on Frances and she
was the only woman I was jealous of.

I did love her. Loved Juliette and Cicely too 
after the fashion I allowed myself
the privilege of. They were all my muses,
not just cover art to tattoo on my
black ass and soul. And the holes 
there were plenty of those were never filled.

The holes are what I whistled through 
not just when I was whistling the first
three notes of Parker's Mood to appease
my jones either. I was rangier than
a shithouse rat. I was. A lot.
I betrayed my father and my mother.

Not one year after my Dad died
my mother bit it on account of C 
I knew she was sick of cancer,
but didn't know how badly. Or when
sheâd make the big exit. And missed it.
And, yes, I missed her funeral too 

but not because I wanted to. At least
not consciously. I was superstitious.
The plane was in the air, and I was on it.
It returned for some mechanical reason or other
and I got off. I got on and off a lot of planes.
Thatâs what this life is. I have no complaints.

I wept the night my mother died.
Something may have died in me. But she,
she's still floating over the smoke
in all the rooms I play. I keep her
and all my women inside of me 

regardless of what they say. So listen:
that haunting melancholy tone they say
defines the essence of loneliness? That's me too.
I didn't cop that in no dime bag
though it sho' nuff comes from the streets
inside of me. I did it all to refine a style.

To be free. Unfettered by convention
and the strictures of your morality.
To get out from behind my horn
I poured myself through it like an elixir.
Drank long and deep of each test tube note.
Screamed before my throat nodes healed 

and was reduced to a hoarse croak
until I upstaged the frog in the prince
that made me turn my back on you.
I came through too. Gave and gave and gave
until my lungs caved in like some
unmined seam in the dark cave I became.

So, yeah, I did behave shamelessly on occasion,
but not because I loved myself too much.
I loved you all. Loved the opportunity to play
without mugging like some Uncle Tom.
(My mother said she'd kill me if I ever
stooped to play monkey to the hurdy gurdy.)

And I didn't. I never kissed no one's ass
I didn't want to. And that hurt me
more times than I can count in ways
most people can't appreciate. The blues I got
I blew my trumpet to. The walls fell
as walls will. There's nothin' else to tell.

I didn't ask to be born into this society.
I didn't invent monogamy or the road
or negotiate either one without a few bumps.
I didn't know love until I was a Daddy
three times and fell for a white woman
in Paris who didn't speak my tongue.

I tried to get her up in my body
with a needle and didn't do right
by Irene, was never the man
she and my kids deserved me to be.
I know this and express my shame
in the only language I really know.

It's not enough. It never was 
but music was all I ever learned,
the only thing that could take away pain
and sustain a life. I made it my wife
and all my musicians a family.
They contain and sustain the best of me.