Dear John, Dear Coltrane

a love supreme, a love supreme a love supreme, a love supreme Sex fingers toes in the marketplace near your father's church in Hamlet, North Carolina— witness to this love in this calm fallow of these minds, there is no substitute for pain: genitals gone or going, seed burned out, you tuck the roots in the earth, turn back, and move by river through the swamps, singing:a love supreme, a love supreme; what does it all mean? Loss, so great each black woman expects your failure in mute change, the seed gone. You plod up into the electric city— your song now crystal and the blues. You pick up the horn with some will and blow into the freezing night: a love supreme, a love supreme— Dawn comes and you cook up the thick sin 'tween impotence and death, fuel the tenor sax cannibal heart, genitals, and sweat that makes you clean— a love supreme, a love supreme— Why you so black? cause I am why you so funky? cause I am why you so black? cause I am why you so sweet? cause I am why you so black? cause I am a love supreme, a love supreme: