Three for Jack Bruce
Sunshine of Your Love
Blues as an atlas, his nomadic voice
filters complaint and ups the curve
to sweetening love like juicing an orange
in gritty reality, all those downs
his bass travels with into a stairwell
a crashed exhilarating crazy fall.
Jack's urgent desperation's in the drop
digging at hurt like a root crop you shake
for soil nuggets that cling as nutrient.
Heroin's his habituated brake
on smashing frontiers with a voice like that
gets through all barriers, Cream 1968
as riff instruction in time-travel rock
arriving sixties future and not past,
like we're early to meet them and not late
in retro, pulling 'Sunshine Of Your Love'
into a Clapton light-the-sky moment
like a virulent red one-man rocket,
'Badge,' 'I Feel Free,' 'White Room,' they drive so hard
they're mobile houses in brain chemistry.
Jack's gone, dissolved into blue Suffolk mists,
October 25, best there was on four strings,
a Gibson EB-3 electric bass
fast picking dispersed into black cosmos;
and now the heartbreak as he starts to sing.
Jack's
Hacks a slice out of my life
Jack's 100 billion bit brain
like a croissant thrown out of a toaster
launched into escape velocity
on a banana yellow parabola
like his impulse to accelerate chords
where playing couldn't follow
Jack.
He's irreducible flavour
to 60s/70s ripping timeline
psychedelics meet period revival
and even the traffic lights turned purple
at World's End - did I ever see it
when I wasn't hallucinated
decades like drug mules hanging out in hills
to return in the wrong century?
Nothing but sound to substitute for Jack
and today the leaves shine like green vinyl
in no-season October
extending summer into illusion
like colour blending hair a blonder blonde,
all that we've lost without him
bigger than how we ever imagine deep space.
For The Record
Sound as a mobile legacy, dead time
until it's activated 'Wheels Of Fire'
blown like a hubcap on the road
into Cream's conversational energies
the drum-stack might just explode
into yellow tempi supernova.
We reference past in present at a click
of consciousness, another time
comes up, a backward thrust to druggy smoke
a generation sold on crime
to live normally, individually.
Jack walks in a brocaded coat so gold
it's autumn on his cuffs, his hair's
like storm, a string of shelf clouds moving in
over where is it, Golden Square
or Berkley, every age its atmosphere,
a colour-code in time, a distinct frame
that can't be any different
annulled, annihilated, we move on
an epoch's so transient
it's like a fingerprint smudged on the sky
a colour separation in decades
gone missing - can't you hear it now
rock as a format - 'Sunshine Of Your Love'
deep orange in the afterglow.
Sunshine of Your Love
Blues as an atlas, his nomadic voice
filters complaint and ups the curve
to sweetening love like juicing an orange
in gritty reality, all those downs
his bass travels with into a stairwell
a crashed exhilarating crazy fall.
Jack's urgent desperation's in the drop
digging at hurt like a root crop you shake
for soil nuggets that cling as nutrient.
Heroin's his habituated brake
on smashing frontiers with a voice like that
gets through all barriers, Cream 1968
as riff instruction in time-travel rock
arriving sixties future and not past,
like we're early to meet them and not late
in retro, pulling 'Sunshine Of Your Love'
into a Clapton light-the-sky moment
like a virulent red one-man rocket,
'Badge,' 'I Feel Free,' 'White Room,' they drive so hard
they're mobile houses in brain chemistry.
Jack's gone, dissolved into blue Suffolk mists,
October 25, best there was on four strings,
a Gibson EB-3 electric bass
fast picking dispersed into black cosmos;
and now the heartbreak as he starts to sing.
Jack's
Hacks a slice out of my life
Jack's 100 billion bit brain
like a croissant thrown out of a toaster
launched into escape velocity
on a banana yellow parabola
like his impulse to accelerate chords
where playing couldn't follow
Jack.
He's irreducible flavour
to 60s/70s ripping timeline
psychedelics meet period revival
and even the traffic lights turned purple
at World's End - did I ever see it
when I wasn't hallucinated
decades like drug mules hanging out in hills
to return in the wrong century?
Nothing but sound to substitute for Jack
and today the leaves shine like green vinyl
in no-season October
extending summer into illusion
like colour blending hair a blonder blonde,
all that we've lost without him
bigger than how we ever imagine deep space.
For The Record
Sound as a mobile legacy, dead time
until it's activated 'Wheels Of Fire'
blown like a hubcap on the road
into Cream's conversational energies
the drum-stack might just explode
into yellow tempi supernova.
We reference past in present at a click
of consciousness, another time
comes up, a backward thrust to druggy smoke
a generation sold on crime
to live normally, individually.
Jack walks in a brocaded coat so gold
it's autumn on his cuffs, his hair's
like storm, a string of shelf clouds moving in
over where is it, Golden Square
or Berkley, every age its atmosphere,
a colour-code in time, a distinct frame
that can't be any different
annulled, annihilated, we move on
an epoch's so transient
it's like a fingerprint smudged on the sky
a colour separation in decades
gone missing - can't you hear it now
rock as a format - 'Sunshine Of Your Love'
deep orange in the afterglow.