PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

There was once a poet of great promise

But he is aged and gone.

Long gone.

 

Don't let him die completely.

 

Dance for him

One more timwe and introduce

New language in his name, like

He would do for you is he still

Loved you.

Remind him why 

You still remember

And you still

Love his legend.

Even if he avoids your glance,

Even if he buried your name in a pit

Years ago,

Try to remind him

That you rode in together

On horses

From the last desert named oblivion,

To a city of hardened steel,

To a train bound for a seaside resort,

With guns that shot nets

To gather crowds

In the lost subdivisions of the city

Long, long ago.

Reminf your riding partner

That you miss him

And, simply,

Wait for him.

Intertwined in so many ways,

The two of you are

Almo0st like a composite 

Of lost cowboys now.

Remember him

So that death possess

No advance,

No majesty,

No dominion.

Death no pale, ashen, Thomasian face

In a gallery of tears;

Life no suffering.

Nothing to forget

Or run to the sea

From.

Yes, the four hundred  blows,

I remember it now

As I recall the small, underground hits

Of the man of promise.

The man who shared sweet, lucid poetry

And did not die,

Because

I did not agree with his dying.

When he

Went whooping like a lark

Over the hills of yesterday

I stood in opposition.

I stoood before the black tanks of death

And watched them roll

As he turned away.

After all, farewell

After such long, close companionship

Is not goodbye.  It is

A stain and a death on the psyche.

Who's death, whether

Mutually assured destruction or

Suicided in a small, Midwestern town--

How much death exactly--

Is the only question.

He is a man who,

As a fan I did not let down,

As a friend I did not break,

I did not pressure or collapse

Or, like a union under God,

I did not secede from with infidelity.

I simply didn't do these things,

For they are too severe to shoulder blame for.

Instead I rehash his words

At the site of his unmarked grave,

Or my own, (I can't decipher just yet,)

So as to taste his strawberry wine just one more time.

 

Why did Jeff Buckley disappear in that river?

Where did Bobby Fisher go?
I wonder if they heard Nick Drake's guitar?

I wonder if they saw Rimbaud?

 

We as poets know this pact

Between us

And do not forget.

Merely we

Move on

In all ways save the everlasting soul.

We share words from the mind

Until

It reaches the heart,

And in that way

Thwere is a guarantee,

A hedging of bets on eternity.

And we die, go mad

Or lose the touch

Collectively in this case it seems,

Like brothers

Lovers

Or sons:

Some new form of family.

However,

The indomitale human spirit

Always rises again

Somewhere else,

Somewhere new,

And we recall former influences

Though we deny

That we sincerely loved them

Or crossed bloodlines.

We replace one goal for another

Like replacing vows, whether

For wedding or religion,

Or old friends;

Something which is hard to leave behind

BUt which leads to another opened door.

We as poets bare but one political agenda,

One party, one theology, and that the art 

Of undressing the human condition,

Nothing more.

And we share this affliction,

Whether up close or from far away,

Whether in our own time or

Spanning the breath of the ages,

As a troop of pied pipers

Marching toward the unseen.

 

How I once dicorced a poet.

How I died to him, in his mind.

How the words dried up

And the manner in which 

I measured myself

Diminished.

I have killed a poet by my own reckless suicide

And as a hand and comrade

To his machine,

I am half the man for it.

The loss of a friend is

A drowning and a wake

And an afterlife of solitude and introspection.

Perhaps, in some cases, a

Justice on you.

A drama you witness but cannot effect.

A divine comedy which passes but which 

No longer responds,

Even to a blow, a Munchian scream, or a kiss

On the nape of the neck.

Life hurtling forward like a speed train

Leaving the station without you.

God's grace infinite.

Man's well for forgiveness another thing entirely.

 

I have killed a myth.

Let myth know its inevitable conclusion 

As legend.

Write a book or ride a motorcycle 

Across the deserts in a MExican summer,

But do not give in to silence.

It is such an oppressive reminder

Of the horrible things behind us now.

Now you are freer than before.

Widowed of my sway, my spotlight glance,

My terrible, maddening love

That came to you

And cut down the human forests around you,

But which refuses to forget,

Disabuse you of or deny the fact that it happened.

You are gay and I

Am straight 

But

I am not ashamed of your influence

On my condition or my writing.

And I am not too prideful

To say thank you, or sorry,

Or that I miss and love you, brother.

Thanks for hte inspiration and deigning

To accept my own.

Thank you for the loosening of the mind

At the sound of your go9lden larynx,

Your free verse and your unbeatable spirit,

Your demand for nothing less thyan absolute creative freedom.

Like Rimnbaud and Verlaine

Floating down the Seine

Dreaming and intoxicated

On absinthe

We once entered into a pact,

A contract determined to know freedonm,

Artistic or otherwise.

It is no more.

However I still 
Carry you at my breast

Every time I take pen to page

And, with all gusto and arrogance,

Presume to expel my voice

Upon the hearts of man.

I am more with you;

I am less without.

I am still alive

However

I weep

At the utterance of your name.

It is a conspicuous absence,

A loss, a great void,

A shami9ng, a tragedy to me.

You are a true poet, old friend.

A real artist in every sense of the word.

I am a falsehood in your light.

A slader on art, more

Brawler than bard.

However without war
There are no poet warriors.

Without sacrifice soldiers make

There is no such thing as freedom.

And without liberated ar5tists and raconteurs

There is hardly beauty anymore.

The void is stifling.

The difference between war and peace,

Between a life full of inner friction togethwer

Or a life apart, is so egregious

That it is as if we are both

Sinking

From the same Titanic,

Tethered to the same wheel.

And as our senses dull, as

Thwere is a muting of our inner Goethe,

A deafening of our Mozart within,

And the mast declines

Into the sea, our love

For all things eternal

No longer defies our failings or pessimism.

We are dancing skeletons of men

In a caberet of the insignificant.

Our dwindling virtues a plague upon

What was once young and said to possess genius,

But which now falls flat

Like white noise or static.

And, like GOethe's Faust, as we age

The devil collects on our gifts and debts

Until we are but common men without lyric cast downward,

Burnt out artists without glory or valor.

Men standing i our graves, as Hugo once wrote,

As our melodies dry up where once we were so inspired and prolific.

 

Where are the great dirges of my youth?

Where is the calculus of the indecipheralble and transcendent?

Whwere is the inspiration, the communion which held me by?

The glimpse at the next generation

of art, music, or literature?

The pathos of immortal love?

My daily bread, served in poetry?

 

My friend,

My blue horsae amid cliche

And oaths of depravity,

A genius and wordsmith who once

Sang to me as a brother

And fellow writer.  As if,

Yesterday,

I was a Beatle and world cause,

Perhaps even the sun to him.

However,

Today

I am but a speck of debris

By a forbidden road in the forest.

Today

I am an insect on the hands of time.

The same abstract that plays God on o0ur toils.

The one that gathers pace

Over the course of our lives.

And now

My time is past,

Our time past.

I hold it like sand, my life, slipping though my finger-bones,

Liek the Hmalet's skull I held at the death of my father,

A prick at the same well-worn pang of grief.

The sharing of light, or truth, recent history between us.

I am but a small, muted private

In a war on banality.

The music gone silent.

The poetry a caged dinosaur.  The furture

Broken down, like all things, as a matter of entropy./

The past a cheap prostitute.

Today

The great gods are oblivious

To the prayers of my fatherts, the dances

That once brought floods

And harvested the kill as a boy,

But which now harrows fallow land.

Today the weather is a grey metallic sky,

More desolation than horror.

 

My friend has moved away.

 

"The dreadful imposition comes blacking in my mind."

I have taken him for granted and with an arrest,

Murdered the operatic Italians, the soaring

Mezzo sopranos that were our collabortation.

After years of slogging beteen psyche-ward and jail

My friend has simply thrown up his hands.
The house, the ark we built burnt down and sunk.

The poetry scrapped and abandoned for blunt logic.

From the everywhere of extended family

To exile in the eternal desert.

How we shared our thoughts.

How you taught me words, and expanded my horizons thus,

My basic capacity to think, and dream.
How you dressed my wounds in that opaque Cuban prison of manic

  depression.

Please take these words as hands to hold your own.

Please accept this verse as love and remorse for a dying friendship,

My beloved, old friend.

Yesterday

I was a Beatle and world cause.

The sun, perhaps,

To at least one man.

Today

I am 

Bereft.

Today

I am

Alone.