[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
I hear he's a wild man a proletarian who
forgets to shave and rejects tutelage
who'll dare nobility to trespass
wherever he decides to take his
constitutional but at the keyboard a
wonder so I am exactly where I need to
be tuning my instrument with Vienna's
finest on a son blown April afternoon
I've made the rounds Baron to count to
Prince had my letter of introduction
passed on tray after tray like an
after-dinner drink it's all a bit dizzy
the lilting queries quaffed heads
bobbing and murmured goodwill
I watched late lights off in the stucco
into creamy arabesques as polite chatter
swirls around me whirls and dips until I
feel I'm being slowly stirred by a
celestial coffee spoon
oh you men who think or say that I am
malevolent and stubborn or misanthropic
how greatly do you wronged me
poems called Ludwig van Beethoven's
return to Vienna three miles from my
adopted City lies a village where I came
to peace the world there was a calm
place even the great Danube no more than
a pale ribbon tossed onto the landscape
by a girl's careless hand into the
stillness I had been ordered to recover
the hills were gold with late summer my
rooms were - plus a small kitchen
situated upstairs in the back of a
cottage at the end of the hill and gas
from my window I could see on to the
courtyard where a linden trees twined
skyward leafy umbilicus candid toward
light walked in the very act of yearning
and I would feed on the Sun as if that
alone would dismantle the silence around
me
[Music]
there's a back alley in my front room
where lifestyles get fine-tuned against
ghetto piano strings outside their
melodies bumping the blues out of 808
sand if you press your ear towards the
front yard you might catch Frankie
Beverly Jam me you into the fade the
three-second gap between the groove
stuck in your shoulder and the boogie
wanting its way out of your hips in the
distance struts the lady who hitchhikes
away from Oak Cliff to South Dallas
every Friday her thumb has 1,800 miles
on it and she never been east of the
Mississippi slow to a crawl her feet on
the concrete be bumping steps high to
the knees she lunge forward down to pave
me you've seen her moving sweat down the
back skin repelling the burn of someone
the kind of black that we saw one with
the nappy big in boastful with the call
big and bushy curl patterns that got no
business being so bound to the block yet
alas she is found profound yet drowning
and brown on her way crosstown
[Music]
thank you
[Music]
you