ferlinghetti said of your work          

“time will be the tattletale”  

yet the silence as time passes

screams

still we lean in to listen  

relying on patience    waiting for the call    poised with eyes opened wide     we wait, yes      but can we  endure tales of one human  trapped behind    his catastrophic vision        we’ve cut ourselves deep  on blank pages    hungry to read the shards of you   countering the thrust of your work     we grope for memories    of a man    entrenched in a lonely  life  of one denied and exclaimed by his  own hand   even death  pushed back    and allowed abandonment  in a  hobbled life       squandered         and alone

yet no tongues are wagging      onto pages still blank of your memory  where is one true friend     to sing of your unholy life    to ease  our  pain of your lonely road to death    did an unfamiliar remorse      blow across your tidewalls       did you crawl       a final eviction  from a hotel of your layered wreckage     you lived the end   in a pain wracked with failure      while bulged hidden beneath skin  the evil of the darkest of your demons  took the stage   spitting its cancerous bile through your tortured belly      already full of life’s poisons     did he know    it was too late      to replay the records of life      too late to abandon arrogance   to learn the give and take of  true love    or friendship

yes      but who will ever know

where are the friends     to scatter the remains of you    who will tell your stories?  who was there with you as a young man       where are the ones whose views weren’t simply from the sidelines?  who cared about the life and death of you, old poet…where are these words   to remind the world that you    and your work existed      who is it that will tell your stories     who was not gorged or distanced by  the bull of your anger     your       arrogance or cruelty   you shone in  your fire’s light     and burned in your stubborn, unwavering heat  

i cannot write a  requiem for a dead poet   my range of vision     showed my eyes the latter years     and the early     before his deluge        i only knew  a  young man  before his estrangement from life        and old man’s fondness for organic zucchini      the tenderness of  the shock and awe    when the simplicity and kindness of strangers  demanded nothing     a shared kindred passion for remembering  stories and memories of an important  past      a pensive finality once  the blanks and slots of a compartmentalized  drug-addled  existence  was understood..

who will write the requiem for a dead poet?    who cared enough to call him friend?

we will wait

to hear your answers