Only a jazz musician knows time

Only a jazz musician knows time.
The rest of us squander it.
In jazz they break seconds down into fractions.
In life, we watch the minutes drag.
We can't wait for one more hour to pass
So we can go home and be with the ones we love.

Time is our enemy. Time is our master.
But a jazz musician is on top of time.
A jazz musician breaks time down
Into eighth notes, sixteenth notes.
A jazz musician compresses time
And squeezes the juice out of it.
A jazz musician knows there is so much
Feeling in every note, and they dare not waste it.

I wish I could control time.
I wish I didn't waste so much of the stuff.
It seeps through my fingers like grains of sand.
What if I could catch each grain as it fell
And build something new out of it
Like a sandcastle or some crazy architecture.
Then I would be ahead of time or at least not wasteful of it.

I wish I knew time like Lee Morgan did.
His life was brief and his death was tragic.
But Lee Morgan knew time.
He was dead before he was 40.
But he was so alive while he was in time.
So alive. So alive.