My Friend Joe

At his best, a living marionette,
All tangled strings,
Head lolling.
Guffawing,
He could make me laugh at nothing more
Than the pure anarchic silliness
Of his movements.

An eye for truth in others,
rather blinded looking inward.
I at one time called him, "wisest man I knew."
In the end though, all was blindness,
And in truth I'd only harmed him,
Proving to myself the wisest wasn’t I.

Angry, even violent,
An awkward, drunken master.
His rage seemed comic, then, theatrical.
Tender age in bloom.

Underneath though,
Hiding in an abyss
Of unspoken anguish,
A demon in the night,
That came to stay.
A black unending cloud.

And when the sun fails to rise,
For you, as it does for others,
When your tide goes out,
Not to return.
When you peer through the darkness,
Searching for those who once you called friend.
When all that peers back
Is that same dark.

The creative act proceeds in parallel,
or reverse parallel,
to the mundane social needs
of beasts like men,
who plot and plod,
scurrying, scaling,
to fashion,
in their mind at least,
an order, some sense,
to themselves and so the world.

Some nights I sit around and,
In my cockeyed stupor,
I think about the last of nights,
And what I put it off for.
I contemplate the vast in height,
Not that it’s what I ask for.
I wonder on the sweet goodbyes,
The souls a soulless one as I,
Though I might suffer else to try,
Could only ever really sigh
And give my mind to.

Ripped too soon from mama’s teat,
Eliminated, endless meat,
Organic, interstellar peat,
To grow between your barefoot feet,
We, those beneath, consent no more.
Please open up this pearly door,
You can keep your heaven,
We want more!
Release us.

93 degrees

Pink Sunset in New York

It was some evening.

I had to head over to the Hudson.

It was damn well worth it.