"Jazz June. We
Die soon."
Analysis
The final stanza of "We Real Cool" suddenly zooms out from the cast of seven players to represent the many young men who walk a similar path; this is accomplished by the present habitual tense of the phrase "We / Die soon," which of course cannot be done habitually by a specific group, because people can only die once. But by conjugating "Die" this way, Brooks makes it clear that her poem is about more than one group of boys in a pool room; she is writing about a pattern of resistance and untimely death that befalls young men in her community.
To "Jazz June" is to inject the spirit of spontaneity, counterpoint, and "cool" into the summer air. Wherever these players go, they claim to have an effect on their surroundings. June, in this case, is simply a time of the year, a calendar month with its own established connotations of what is "right" and "orderly." Children playing outside, people going for walks, birds singing in the trees. But when these players enter the idyllic summer scene, they "jazz" it. They add an element of unpredictability and cool associated with jazz, which at the time of the poem's publication, was still considered a subversive genre in the predominantly white-controlled mainstream music industry, a genre prejudicially associated with drug use and other vices.
