Against the wind with fists of rage
He stands in youth despite his age
He’s walked the ice and witnessed the floe
Refusing to worry of his time to go
Defiance resides in his eyes
Like storm clouds dotting morning skies
He will not bow he, will not bend
He takes his time to meet the end
He fears nothing on his own
Intimacy though chills his bone
Alone he stands against the wind
No bad choices may he rescind
Perhaps one day he’ll find his faith
Until the end he stands the wraith

Bolo tie
Primped and fly
Dining on nostalgia, for nostalgia’s sake
Living off the food at Kurt Cobain’s wake
Pressing a Mangum to your head
A case of Velvet dread
Addicts caught up in the Reed(s)
Sticky Fingers and their steeds
A Moonlit Mile
A case of Kurt Vile
A Day Dream Nation’s falling apart
Little Wing's lost its heart

The whispers of a thousand ladybugs
Caught in a strand of sunbeam
Became slurred
One more White Russian
Sloshed down and stirred
In the belly of that brilliant star
Gave birth to sweet summer
The seventh month, day five
Seemed silent in comparison to the night before
Where blasts became a long drone
And drowned out that roaring train
Which would (on any other night)
Rattle the blinds of this small home
We see that it is soon to be emptied
And even more quickly, after,
To be full once more
We are at the crossroads
Of interspace and matter
But those thousand tiny wings
Kick up dust off our old albums and memory boxes
And leave them hanging there
Suspended in threads of light
Such big eyes we have
All the better to dream with
Sleepwalkers, forevermore

We gather them,

These stolen moments,
These orphaned seconds,
These lost dark minutes.

Stateless, Unattached,
These refugee clicks
With no form or voice
Do not belong here.

We pile them up,

These off cuts of time,
These shards of passing,
This swarf of tempo.

Shreds of interval
And dislocation
With no named event
To give them title.

And with our small words we bind them,
A suture in the wounded day,
To make a tiny poem of the scars.

The quartet became a trio
The trio became a duet
The duet became a solo act
The first chair was ambidextrous
His hands worked as a duo
He called them Cain and Abel
They had great reflexes
He washed them with soap and water

He played in light houses
Night clubs
Tin Pan Alley

He sang about tapped phones
With a dead pan, dry humor
And dehydrated wit
To a room full of sugar daddies and their sugar babies
His music left them befuddled but hungry for more

He ate nothing but black bean brownies for weeks
Any tiny morsel of food he could find to survive
He wore a pork pie hat
And would always say "lather rinse repeat"

To him racism was a detestable invention of mankind
"Towel-head"
He cringed at that word

But when he got on stage at The Tree Trunk a moment of tranquility commenced

The cow jumped over the moon.
Udderly de-fence-less..