DISCO INFERNO

Jimmy Ellis of The Trammps has passed away -- I got a request from someone too young to own a copy of my first book for the poem that borrowed its title from The Trammps' 70s hit DISCO INFERNO -- so here's the poem, which I always imagined being read in Ellis's voice.

DISCO INFERNO

(1948)

Good Hair favored and was favored by his father

In a time when being fair was being favored

He hadn't asked for either being born had left him

Marked along his outside in visible sign

The contributions of both his fathers' worlds and his mother's

Cloak of many colors coated him sealing off

The impertinenece of tragedians but not of his brothers

Who considered it a sin everybody loved Good Hair

But not his brothers who could not fit his fortune

To theirs wondered why he played at Indian chief

African king Mexican cowboy everything

But what he was since what he was

Was why he was so

Favored in spite of all he hadn't asked

For yet he played the part accepted the ashen gift

And handed nothing round to them

Three times a seventh son he grew and as he grew

More freely longed to lord it over till taking

Good Hair in hand his brothers pulled his prideful thing out

From the house into the field and drawing him across a preaching stone

Hacked it off

(1958)

Good Hair steamed relaxed to winter's waving iron

Enjoying the way he feathered into his lover's ear

Curled to pistil in her ear

Grinding in red cellars to Do-Wop-Do-Wop

While Mama and her white lights were out

And stiff-knee slow-drag held sway Good Hair burned

Dripping the lye into his lady's mouth she twisted

And chewed and spat it out as bills and babies

All repeating Good Hair's heady infusion

Become a raggedy act

Conked upon his cooking brain and ran him out

Of slap creased satin and stingy brim and white silk socks

Good Hair's confections were out of stock and himself

Unshelved the promise breached and fugitive

Good Hair was lambent upon the city's cracking skull

An unfurrowed mule straining at the bottled bit

Curls falling beneath the rain's polluted do-rag

Dripping into rolled up high water slacks

Couldn't drown the man who carried in his cups

Four roses and a fifth for balm

Good Hair was revolting

(1968)

Good Hair thinning and out of style had no use

For invented picks after all he's had his

Natural for ten years inadvertently

Forked over in the absence of anointing oil

Relaxer swallowed straight for want of straining bread

Good Hair was cornered surviving squeeze

Immunized against prevailing trends biding his time

Till youth approached

Dungareed

Militant and disarming they cut a swath

Combed through the folk for salvageable soul

Reefer falling into the intersection anxious

To sell a day's labor or lacking that

Beggary securing change his self-effacement repelled

Spare he wheeled unsure spilling out

Upon his own passing impervious kind spoke Good Hair

"Dirty Britches! You can't speak? You ain't worth the wiping

Anyway. I've killed at least one white man more than you

Even if it was only me. You ain't doing nothing for me to learn.

I am the blues! Come see about me!"

(1978)

Good Hair in his element at last

Briefly waves his third finger and goes back to drowning

No one cares dancing as his discs slip back beneath the surface

His one beat samba goes better beneath

They come they look they leave him there

His relentless improvisation dragging him down

Under the staid sands of the quickening motive

No one dares be about Good Hair

But all take up his floating mane

Lining their heads with his hoary wares

Brotherly homage to the self-diminished mind

Looks nowhere for cause or corollary

Prances to unchanging count

Minces the meat of history

The long playing revolutions wear the needle down

The jockey changes but the rhythm remains

Sterile gargling Good Hair whirling round

In whitening esophageal death of his own kind

Kindly trampling this last evacuee whose

Head is all that holds them up the floor skin waxes rolls into the

Exit light dancing away with Good Hair's dancing yeah