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
The “Words” are here. Beautiful tribute.