Friends, poets, and critics, lend me your ears;
I come to praise poetry, not to bury it.
For the printed Words of men live after them
And their words, briefly spoken, oft interred to the wind.
So let it be Words the ambitious dead sing from their graves,
The grievous faults, passions, dreams, and fears of poets long buried
sink into the incomprehensible part of your mind
from where everything beautiful drips, spills, and soars.
A place no lover or friend can answer,
a place where no Words are wasted,
for they are honorable syllables, faithful and just.
Ambitious before my funeral,
I come now to sing Words immortal onto the willing white pages
to the honorable souls long after me,
pressing their own pens to survive the ages.

A Poet is a soul suffering silently and alone behind absorbing eyes
A Poet moans music and sighs syllables into obedient ink
Poets can be white, grey, red, green, black, yellow, blue, or pink.
They wonder while they wander
As they silently ponder the life they walk atop the Orbiting Rock.

With deprived minds and closed eyes
Poets spill the truth in ink
in hopes his words in deep they sink.
He can savor every sense
Or be numb to all but his two-cents.

Bleeding deep yet never running dry,
a Poet loves too much and drowns.
He is a thinker, a lover, a child.
A poet paints the simplest of common truths
With paint he mixed from the world around him

A poet knows his friends, but not himself.
He is an actor, scenes upon a stage,
He is a man, pen upon the page.
A poet waltzes with words as he does with girls:
drunk and uncensored in the night.

Poets will never truly die,
Kerouac and Wilde might concur
For a Poet dives to dark depths unknown, unsure of his breath
and with pen creates, transcending death.

We are all poets, lovers, and children
standing on this revolving rock spinning into the void infinite,
casting pennies to the rushing stream wishing for cheaper fares
wondering as far as we dare  
with nothing but our heads about us
and our hearts beneath our chests
kept apart from all the rest.

I once dreamt of a distant skyline soft and grey against blue
jazz floating with taxis down crowded avenues of the night
grooving naked and echoing across a city cast brick by brick by broken bones,
heaving with memory and time and
forged by fresh sweat of young dreaming minds in the old fuming furnaces of our fathers,
now fueled by foreign fingers.
Sturdy by the Hudson, we endured as our sweat cooled.
we saw aluminum birds seek explosive perches on the most vulnerable of branches
We shook and we grit our teeth as our Towers fell,
sweat now beading as mothers and brothers knelt weeping.
Sifting the dust and twisted steel, we stooped and bled,
swearing and wishing our enemies dead.
But from the gritty hate we rose and looked in each others eyes.
For the sun also rises and the distant bell tolls,
we set our jaws and gathered our dead under the ancient skies
and came together once more, with plans in our minds.

I once shot a bird while my mother cried
A single pellet in a winged angel, stolen from the unforgiving sky
Neither burial nor pyre brings ease to her mind
for her boy shot a bird,
and she saw and she cried.
I held the rifle in front of me,
Its wood my flesh, aging and weary.
As I approached the pigeon bleeding, soon to be sleeping,
I laid a hand on maternal shoulders weeping.
The mechanics of life cocked bitterly in my hand
also ran red amongst feathers down into the thirsty earth once again.

Alone on this spinning rock we wander
My pen, my hand, I ponder
the solitary path I trip
and the infinite white upon this page I drip
With only this pen to write in blue
I sit silently searching for you
A mind I seek to share my soul to keep.
So if I may, with no sound nor peep
convey the message the reader doth seek:
By pen, not sword, or paths do cross
In word and ink our hearts do touch.
In peace, through art, love favors not
so together with pen we undo the timely knot.
Do away with people who may be bought
and know love can be fruitlessly sought
for with this pen I whisper to you:
Along thy path stay strong and true,
and know, this moment here, right now,
I do share with you.