There's a promise of rain
again, today, my faithful companion
the clouds are dark & the air
is  sultry in it's sweat awaiting it's arrival

I didn't eat my breakfast egg today
I didn't catch the train to Windermere
for the first time, as planned
so instead I'm stuck on Weston sands

The dunes by which he wrote of me,
my poem ' Stralsund' & the Baltic Sea
The tide is out, the donkeys are still around
though there's no children to ride them

today & the seagulls have no chips to steal
from passers by & nothing seems real
nothing can be if my love did not win
& if all that's left is just the memory of him

The city's shrouded in smoke today
smoke coats my mouth, throat & eyes

& I know, I know.
       I should be writing in form,
in rhyme - villanelles, sonnets, terza rima
      some say there's too much free verse, some say, it's like
everyone's jumped on the bandwagon
       yet the most of the magazines still all want rhyme
                 but sometimes this is just the tune
                                    your heart sings, a broken smile
                                    & the way the images build up
                                        waiting to sail like ships in the harbor


& besides, should we really be writing in villanelles when we are the Mad & I see now, the best minds of our generation, the gifted,

the naked wastrels of the coming apocalypse,
talking to lamp posts, screaming of Ginsberg's Moloch

& the wrongs they did us, yet not destroyed even as we scream locked
behind whitewashed walls in razor-blade glint & halogenic

glow of ECT or walk the empty streets at guerilla dawn
& dusk, bearing the ample weight of our drugged-up minds

like those martyrs of the old Soviet Union & clinging
on to memoirs of our stolen, interrupted, spiritual awakening,

searching for the redemption of litter in this hobo life, 
changing countries like some change bed sheets,

others rooted by the invisible chains of familiarity & home, still calling
for the road, oh Kerouac, the fallen angels of tomorrow strung out on sweet

childhood memories & jazz in starved sunsets,
picking themselves up to pick at their scab wounds,

spitting at corrupt governments, bitter with alcohol,
writing poems of unrequited love to poets

far better than us, while Elvis croons
in the background & a Baboushka spits sunflower seeds

in the Russian town of my ancestors
& an open air film plays in black & white

& this colorless summer is nearly over
& they still haven't lifted their sanctions

them with their stone gods of war & psychiatry,
always lining up the next undesirables :

you could be next, yes you with the rainbow eyes
you the believer, you the dreamer of visions

Oh pity them, the children of smoke,
blind to the vagabond, the poet, the lover

lost children always seeking out the same roads
the city is shrouded in smoke

& I wonder if it's not always been there
& if we're living amongst blind men

ones that never read poems
or else how could all this happen

Nothing is meant by
this August ; the still bright sky
does not confess.

Come on, Lady Luck
Throw the dice, spin
the wheel or draw a straw

tell me which way to go
which of these verses
would make his heart sing

for we poets are sirens
driving men to the rocks
& the clock waits so patiently

in the corner, in on the plan
& the city is a memory
sketched in teenage graffiti

& I'm Iggy's ' Passenger'
on a never-ending train
seeing my youth calling again

passing by me
behind cracked glass
beckoning the imagination

laughing, teasing:
' Are you lucky, Miss'
the answer comes : silence

like before the beginning of the world

He finds the clues
come to him like fireflies
swarming around him
in the air

murderers all have
long shadows
& some were born
with silver spoons

in their mouths
& others not
He assembles collages
of cases from newspapers

to see which ones
remind him of which
& drinks too much
as the night holds him close.

He's got a Dame in town
he knows she's bad news
He knows his whole life is
a case of Win or Lose

A card trick
played by a blind man
he has too many regrets
& yet none at all

My moustache it tells me you did it. Don't argue.

She tells me not to talk about my life
true poets write of other things, she says
then reads a poem about her marriage, husband

I'm reminded of Sylvia Plath's struggles
how she would not have followed such advice
or else not become the icon that she is

besides, as Langston Hughes said
' No great poet should ever be afraid of being himself'
or something like ( replace that with 'herself')

& does not a life contain universal topics
that ties us all together in one universe
so all I say is write, write what you know