not so lucky

I remember this one night when I was with
Sarah and Jonathan and Sammy and Rachel.
I was with Rachel and
Jonathan was with Sarah
and we walked around
downtown
thinking we were
lucky.
I saw old men
snoring on the streets
and beautiful woman walking by
in heels
as I pretended they were not there
while I had a woman
under my arm.
It felt empty, like holding onto
nothing,
nothing at all.
the cars drove by and the sleeping bags
kept piling all around me
as I thought of the real
lucky ones.

writers

we like to hear that writers are
often
told what
to create with their inner fire

I will tell you the secret: there is none.

writers chase back and forth
trying to find the word.

are you the word?

they will ask.

they are desperate
like the lover.

a writer will not tell you his greatest secret
of trying.
a writer
in fact,
will not tell you anything at all.

some only speak to nothing.
they will look at nothing
and
they will hold themselves
as the greatest challenge to conquer.

the ones that try find that their
is no challenge.
they are better off
doing something else like
falling in love
or filling the empty space
with nothing
at all.

it is the ones that surrender that
move on to entertain the
masses.

but what they don't understand
is that they began
to
stay away from them
in the first place.

but what no one seems to
understand
is why anyone
would want to stay away
from them
in the first place.

day

I leave for work
get in the car
start the engine
put the music on classical.
it's a warm mid-november day.
the birds fly
the traffic rolls along as it always does.
their is rain pouring in some corner of the world
there is a woman reading a newspaper on a bench
but the piano plays on.
like burning fire writing is prolific
it is stupid. stupid.
I listen to a dead man's music
as the world slowly leaves him behind.

these are nights
gutted like a fish
crawling through the edges of my skin
and, please
Oh please... do not forget
loneliness.
it is an art to be lonely,
but a chain to be unhappy and
taken.

the classics

I've listened to them
all.
frank sinatra
miles davis
dave brubeck
john coltrane
thelonious monk
duke ellington
charles mingus
art blakey
ella fitzgerald
louis armstrong
tommy dorsey (before he brought in frank)
benny goodman
count basie
and If I've missed one,
please forgive me,
I did not have time to name them all.
and I know you are all in your graves
and
tonight I gracefully dig you
to listen to you
once again when life has
itself
dug its own
miserable grave.
except you were anything but,
you were the life in your death that
I never had in
life.
at least not yet.
it's all playing
playing in the backround
as they
begin to bother you
questioning
what exactly it is that you're
doing.
it's all so strange to them
too.
and I don't blame them;
they don't know where I am
(I don't know either)
frank sinatra plays
another song
and life
prevails.

the gray moon

love prevails in all these strange
places
I almost can't seem to
understand
it anymore.
it's all so strange to me.
like,
you can lay listening to
frank sinatra
ages behind on your time
and
wonder why it does not go in your
favor.
and then you blame fate for it
all.
and you take a drink.
smiling, knowing that the moon
is ages behind on its time too.
except it has no love.
no rythm.
just the gray dark
emptiness
of it all.

all of it

I think it's all part of some grand
majestic plan
all of this:
yes
you and me
and I
and them
and they's:
all of them.
the man in the bistro
the man in the bar
the man in front of the screen
writing away
into some
estranged world
it's all part of some grand majestic
plan
all of this
this poem
this night
this moon
this galaxy far far away.
it's all the same old shit
these words,
their are 36 of them in the alphabet and
millions and millions more of different colors.
the
stray cats and
the
hot brass trumpets and
red hot saxophones on a 12 bar solo
play into the night too.
it all makes sense as much as the
end
of this poem
this night
and all of that other
stuff
in between.

spirit

the word finds itself
often
as love brims and
blossoms at the edge of a rose
dancing in the fiery
sunlight of a day gone
wild
wild with love
gone
free
love is free and is so is the
spirit and
mine as flown away
far
far away into
the wind.