“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.” -Albert Einstein

The best and worst of times are now rubbing up against each other. We are now entering a realm where time is blowing, stretching the screeches of saxophones to the highest tones unheard. Crying through suburban trees and the high rises of a thousand cities, through canyons, forests, and frozen wastes where it sometimes stops. A moment may be all the time we have left. The singer says, “I got the blues this time, this time I got the blues for sure.” Time may be losing control. The players are beginning to look confused. Dizzy¹ ain’t where he used to be; he feels like the numbers have changed, the count is off and the time signatures have been persistently transformed by Salvador². Signed by time means it’s an official document and this document declares we need more time! What do we want? We want more time, all the time in the line! Gather it up, cook it up, and share it with a junky friend. The needle like the tip of a mountain spears an extra second. Place it on the tip of my tongue and I am immortal for a little while. Didn't you check the expiration date? Open the lid and smell; time has spoiled everything. Our packages will never be delivered. The sea I'm adrift in doesn't want me anymore. Time, the storm, is destroying symbols and metaphors. Even when I crash, who will hear me? The hourglass is empty. My seconds like grains of sand dance in the poetry of a heartbeat, pumping life into a tune not yet written.

  
 I’m seeing this like a truncated be-bop introduction. Not talking ‘Trane³ either but Bird.⁴ Bird is the rule of flight. Bird changes the rules of flight. I wanted to take that train but in my heart I knew I could only make my melody connection If I forced myself over the cliff and in that split second, that moment in time that slips by, opens my eye, my wings, hallucinations they may be, catch the wind of time and fly like Bird. Conquering the world, sweat soaking through shirts. Well that’s the ideal, isn’t it? Flying the river of time reveals ancient mysteries, angels, demons all under the hot city lights and I’ll stand on my goddamn head and applaud with my feet. Feet first I’m crawling out of the water. Evolving like a groove, the needle penetrates and reproduces each sound. It comes from a legend. Legends come from another time. ‘Present’ legends are bad jive and ain’t no brother can dig bad jive. Those two words don’t even work together and we need to work together so later we can rest. A whole rest. In a whole rest, I can order my beer, finish it, order another, smoke reefer, and finish the second beer before I take another breath; before I pour my new breath straight down the throat of my skinny, sexy saxophone. That’s the whole point of a whole rest. Stop, breathe the absence of the beat, and then find my seat at the Five Spot Café.
 
Does the racing in my stomach have anything to do with it? It has to do with caffeine, Benzedrine. It’s driving me to the beat. All Beats. There’s Jack⁵ keeping time on the ride. It’s a symbol. A cymbal means something symbolic and to Jack it means one hell of a long ride, the sad skies and holy miles. Not only up and down like the high hat but over and across, (raging continents) high and low, between space and time (Big Bang). When he looks up at the ceiling in the smoke drenched lair in the beat filled air he’s seeing the blue way up there we all crave to see. A space in time. He reaches out his finger, long painted finger. He touches the blue, the roaring high blue, and that's when symbols crash. The beat is turned around. His finger reaching to your finger attached to your hand and the soul in you, which unfortunately spends time (priceless) doing the unthinkable, working to bring home the bread instead of lying on your back soaking in forever to touch the true blew sky in your infinite mind (eternal). Instead there’s a smoke filled sky ruined by distractions, contraptions, yearnings, and regret resigned to the toilet, pushed too far under the bed; behind the beat. The metronome tossed out with the baby in the bath water. Pushed like a syringe, drop of blood on the tip, drugs rushing, and slowing life’s heartbeats, drumbeats nodding in the gutter of existence. Time is coming to make a change. Time is a change from the day without a yesterday. Unzip those trousers, skirts, and suits and get naked in the existential rush of the unknowable universe, (expanding) which is whether you know it or not waiting for you. It will always wait for you because it doesn’t know time. 

(Hey Jack) there’s no repeat sign. Search for the beat that fits in time and you’ll find the Beats know time. Jack said so and so did Neal⁶ and Lawrence⁷ managed to paint those words in time to sign up with. Words dipped in colors of meaning plastered and dripped on the mad canvas floor like Jackson,⁸ inside the painting, inside the moment, spilling his guts. Emotional ticks and tocks howling; every second holy; shot up with crazy new ideas nailed to the bandstand like Christ on the cross, like the set list. Like long precious time, minds’ drifting past pain, past the planet into eternal beats like the atomic clock. And because the clock stops for no one, at least no one we know, until (Shit) too late when our bones have turned to powder and our eyes have shriveled and dried. No sight, no vision in a timeless night; where dark has no meaning and when the clock strikes twelve it counts it out in four beat bars: twelve bar blues, the foundation. Satchmo⁹ swimming in that tune, cutting beats with razor smiles. Drinking, talking, smoking, digging multiplied by three all night long until the morning comes but the morning always comes because even the goddamn earth is a fucking clock. Time wasn’t born of necessity. It’s the only thing that never splits; time ain’t splitable (there’s no atom here), it doesn't catch the next train, it’s a theory only recently Albert¹⁰ got his hands on, got his equations to make sense of the absolute king of intangibles. He makes time begin its slow drip into reality and our addiction is to the idea, the concept, and the enchantment. The ghost-like color of time is printed on the sheet music and fed through amplifiers. The volume includes the destruction of the inner workings of melting, mangled clocks while Allen¹¹ tickles the pubic hairs of every piano he can get his hands on, glissando to the max. To know him is to love him. He takes a photograph. To know time is to dig the no time idea. Know idea what time is.

 (Interlude)

What if I fell into the pit of Desperation and there at the very bottom where the dirt is black as night but clean as the day’s first breath, what if I saw the tiny tip of something jutting up from the cool black earth. What if I began to dig it? If I began to dig it out using my finest archeologist digging fingers - the crumbs of earth gathering under my nails, my hammered nails, until the secret of Time is given to me. The capital T, the lower case: i – m – e. I would touch time and make it mine. Time may be! A major discovery; my life could be backed up, saved in a new file; I wouldn’t have to look back, I wouldn’t have to be concerned (frightened) of the future; I could just be. Be. I’m digging the philosophy of time. I’m reading it now. I carefully slide the book of Time into my rucksack. My moment is to climb from the pit with the secret of time intact back to the surface, back to the bandstand. I’m dreaming of saving the universe, lifting the veil of illusion from the eyes of civilization. Beads of a profuse sweat form on my forehead. They race down my face and directly into my eyes as if of an evil design so my vision is compromised and the moment I move my hands from my sides to my eyes to ease my salty pain, in my attempts to restore my vision, my sack is brutally sliced from my back by a scaly green arm with knife like blades instead of fingers which have emerged from the black earth and are shaking the ground like the rumble seat rumbles in a 1932 Ford; like the rattle and hum of a kick drum. I turn in panic to reach my sack and the priceless secret inside but instead I am hurled by the snaky green arm up and out of the pit. As I venture one step away, Desperation closes like the snap of an elevator door and I am there in the doldrums, the ho-hums of ordinary time. My memory of Time’s secret slipping into the vague blankness behind my eyes and suddenly I am frozen, time is ruined. My temporal knowledge splayed on a cutting board sliced up like Neal’s brains washed clean before sliding into the sewers of nevermore.
  

I said, “where did it go,” You said, “just plain ran out.” I said,” If I had some more,” You said, “ There’s never enough.” I said, " I’m sorry you ever earned your wings, time."

In my dreams, it’s different; I never run out. I’m engaged in a slipstream of endless time running right along side of me; a twisting, powerful current, which is deep and misunderstood. On some levels, it speaks to me in a rushing whisper. Then it sidles up close to me and presses it’s lips, aching with fever and desire, like a chisel on my lips. I cough. My intimacies with time seem vulgar; how dare I touch the untouchable? I’m shocked as to how far I will go but I need to go all the way; there is no other course. Running along side time is a farce; only total immersion will bring my degree in satisfaction and satisfaction in this school will only bring the liquid hands around to surround me and take me down, far down into the writhing depths of murky time where one day I am washed ashore, another grain of sand.

Notes:

1.    Dizzy Gillespie

2.    Salvador Dali

3.    John Coltrane

4.    Charlie Parker

5.    Jack Kerouac

6.    Neal Cassady

7.    Lawrence Ferlinghetti

8.    Jackson Pollock

9.    Louis Armstrong

10.Albert Einstein

11.Allen Ginsberg

Tim lives and writes in mid-town Manhattan. If asked he would tell a story about how he looked over the river Hudson before it had its name. Tim's roots are in Pennsylvania and in Rock n Roll
beginning with Frankie Lymon and Dion Dimucci.
In addition to New York City, Paula, and his son, Adam, attending Mansfield State University in
Mansfield, Pa., are major highlights.