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Among the dead,
gone & remembered,
poets from the past
who smoked too much,
who talked, who nested in bars,
who found room inside for both
despair & hope, who fucked,
who loved, who chanted mantras,
who sat alone on park benches watching
the sun climb up & up until
it hovered above the city.

Poets who jumped from ships
or swallowed a bullet or tied themselves
to a swaying tree or opened a wrist
or took an overdose of pain relief
or gently laid a feverish head into
the waiting,
open oven.

We left behind words,
words jotted down in notebooks,
words quickly scribbled
on scraps of paper, napkins, envelopes,
words found printed
in published collections,
the pages yellowed & thumbed
into road-map creases.
We left behind words,
words we passed on
in conversations hoping
someone understood us.
The words were there
when we rose
& the words were there
when we fell.

existential geometry

Remorseful and mysterious,
sinners looking for salvation,
the messengers rode
easily toward the frontier town
at just the knife-edge of sunset.
The sky grew dark and
passed no judgment.
Leather saddles creaked, groaned,
the horses were misted
with sweat and alkaline dust.
Four men rode with purpose,
with pistols armed and ready,
and behind them an open road
curved and stretched for miles
into the distance.

At the gate,
one lone watchman.

what ya gonna do?

The blood-soaked coast after weeks of searching,
after I lost the map,
after my old shoes eroded.

One morning dawn appeared, glorious,
and we trudged up one side of a dune
then down the other, and there it was.
Red sand.
Low, low tide.
Carrion birds high above.

Bones of the martyrs, future relics,
bleaching in the morning sun.

Instead of shells, or jellyfish,
or sea-soaked driftwood,
a beach covered in relics.

End of the journey,
but has anything changed?
Forgiveness is never that easy.
Sins cannot be sloughed away
like dead skin gone to ashes.

**

Last night it rained.
I think I finally understand
Nietzsche's last descent,
too late of course.
There's a truth so hard
so shiny that the edges
cut me,
and I just know.

"Old men ought to be explorers"

Moving outside the lines,
a shirtless young man
with a shatterproof air
of casual indifference and
Caravaggio’s boy-angel wings
skateboards the steps
of Union Square park.
I watch,
contained
inside my solitude,
as he circumnavigates
the crowd without touching it.

Closing my eyes,
I think of sailing.

I think of deep water,
and drifting, and the waves,
and the ocean tides
pulling me down.

Opening my eyes, I look
in vain for cracks
in his casual facade.