last limb

these city streets

in spite of it all

never look back

to serve

an ode to resilience

vie nocturne

Dear Professor Bonagura                                                                                                             11/3/10

The 25 cent peep shows and the creeps come out of the shadows

And the addicts live in the cracks; the crack-heads pick up the rocks,

And their pockets are full of ashes

The pigeons soil the streets

The spirits spill on the streets.  

All the queers come alive, in an Oscar Wilde afterlife

And look for solace in an ever distant world

I bow before the drag queens, who in the moonlight wear their sunscreen

As my breathe crystallizes in the cold

On these streets, where dreams are bought and sold

And souls are traded for a piece of flesh

I’ve read between the lines and I’ve seen the lies of false prophets

And the holes that fill the empty spaces

 And the thieves drop their nets as the bookies place their bets

On the lonely, dying dream

Another primadonna shot on the scene

Another premature coffin

Another sacrifice to the omnivorous beast

And in the underground the band plays

And in the hall the demons dance

On these streets where blood stains fill up the empty glass

The city is like a broken crown that shines, like an immortal god that dies 

I’ve shared the wealth of paupers and I’ve seen the poverty in the coffers of kings

These are a few of the things that pull at my heartstrings and the angels play my life like a lonely harp.  

to surrender

Dear Prof. Bonagura,                                                                                                                      10/6/10

I watched the flame in the breeze; desperately clinging to the wick like a child free-style, balancing on a fence as she dances.  So fleeting is the life of the flame, so ephemeral, it has but a glimpse and it vanishes.  We are all like flames clinging to some temporal surface.  When I am around you the ground moves beneath me, you transcend the world and your soul divides into pieces and you fill the empty spaces that surrounds me.  When I am with you my heart races, I try to keep pace, but to stay close to you, is like chasing and oasis. You are like an orchid, a symbol of beauty.  You are a Venetian street, full of cobblestone and granite; you are like the hills of Tuscany.  I know now why a flower must be elusive, you enter without being intrusive, and you speak without having spoken and your silence is like music, your are the potion that poisons my thoughts, you intoxicate, you are the vine that stretches to the sky and the clouds part so you may pass, you are golden like stardust, tender like a blade of summer grass.  When you awaken the world awakes to greet you, when you smile the world comes to meet you.  I love when you are melancholy, it is like the river sighing.  I love you when you are quiet, almost absent, and your silence is a lullaby, and it quiets my thoughts.  Let me speak to you with your silence, and a smile will suffice.  Let me breathe with your breath and I’ll suffocate the sadness.  And I’m joyful, fixed in wonder as I lie awake in madness.

Immigrants

When one lives abroad in a foreign country, a piece of their heart always wears an empty space, a longing for that distant place. America is a land of immigrants and so many of these in a sense live in two worlds, as though they are a giant stretching across a large body of water with a foot on each island.

They came from deformed borders; they’ve traversed barbed wire boundaries.  They’ve crawled on crooked highways, and crossed misty mountains.  They brought with them the world and were marginalized into corners and crevices.  They dreamed of fortune but subsisted on substandard conditions.  They struggled to the last dying breath of each day and continue to come and to hold America to its true promise of freedom.

Dreams are our fears, desires, worries, longings, and thoughts that are buried in our subconscious, but perhaps they are something more.  Perhaps they are the kingdom of unborn tomorrows.

who loves the sun

Who loves the Sun?

I remember when I was a child, and at dusk I would chase the fireflies in the fading summer sun.  Just before the sun retired to its chambers, and slept in golden slumbers and dreamt of constellations.  The sun would exhale one last euphoric breath and the effervescent Venus would appear in the gentle dark blue firmament.

Now I lavish in the absence of the sun.  I walk the streets at night, when all the secrets come undone.  I feel free inside the blackness; I bathe inside shadows, night is modest yet dignified, it’s subtle yet graceful and doesn’t flaunt like the garish sun.  The night is never as evil as convention suggests; there’s something sacred about the night.  The sun can deceive you with its radiance, there’s more devil in the sun than a thousand defiant nights ganged up in an angry mob.    

I walk the streets to find myself.  I walk until I become trapped like Houdini tied up in chains, locked inside a cage, submerged in a shark infested pool, and I try to escape before the break of day.    

At night I see the world as it is, wild and tainted, vulnerable and unabashed.  I see the beggars and the junkies, the night is a paradise lost, a carnival of humanity.  I see the vagrants and the demented, the restless youth in revelry.  I walk until the streets become my dreams.  The silence begins to speak.  I listen.  It wants to be heard.  If it isn’t heard it dies a lonely death of neglect.  Silence holds within it all the answers to the unquiet mind.  Silence recites poems, and sings in the gentle hours of dawn.  Silence and night are god’s forgotten love-children.

When I see the freaks, the hobos, the whores and the junkies, I see beauty too.  All the outcasts are like endangered species.   The sin is never as wicked as the verdict decries. There is more evil in the cloaked magistrate than in all the criminals rounded up in an angry gang. 

I keep on walking allured by the menagerie of night.  I walk past the prison.  I think to imprison someone is to kill their soul; to erase their humanity; it’s like running through the Louvre with a butcher’s knife and willy nilly slashing at the paintings.   

I walk until I reach the sidewalk’s end, and gaze upon the river that moves like an exodus of refugees in the moonlight.  The river is the only body that can bare my burden.  I continue walking from the banks onto the water, stepping softly onto the splashy surface.  Step after step I proceed to scale the surface of the river, gently traveling across her body like a delicate leaf that floats atop.  I gaze downward at the world beneath me, the swarms of fish that swim feverishly.  The tales that rivers have to tell are ever-bounding.  I grow tired and decide to rest upon the banks.  My eyes gaze upward at the stars and I begin to examine each one individually and ponder if each star had just been born or had died some ages before shinning its last dying light.   My eyes grow heavy; my lids droop downward and acquiesce to the great tug of gravity.  I begin to see darkness and from that blanket of black, a single point of light obstructs.  “Wake up.”  I hear a soft voice summon.  Intoxicated by the sound I follow the harmonic voice that resonates like a song throughout my bones and through my nerves.  I follow like a child capriciously chases a firefly in the twilight summer sky, reaching toward the effervescent Venus.

Ephemeral Heart

Daniel                                                                                                                                                   10/27/10

The bleating, beating heart ticks tick-tock-tick

In the shadows of memory, faces recede from light,

Passion is the ebb and flow; we are moonstruck by the night

As stars mystically conduct and our hearts are temporally plucked

From the shelter where they reside

The wailing, weeping heart cries, drip by drip

The yearning tears vainly drop, in puddles of melancholy

We travel into the thick

And dark recesses of mind

And our hands will briefly grasp

But for the fleeting moment that ephemeral thought will last

Human flaw is to control what by nature is unfettered

The caged bird will escape and leave but the remnants of a feather

So does the sacred moment pass and descend

Into the depths of dark ocean, until the memory has but faded

And blended with the mass of mystery

Disguised like esoteric text on anonymous mystic pages

The ephemeral heart has but a savor

 And bitter is its taste, for dreams are often prematurely picked

 By the fickle sickle of time and the fruit is laid to waste

The ephemeral heart has but a gaze

And fleeting is its glance

What is etched in memory lies burning

 Yearning one more dance