You are gone and I
Realize I don't know how to
Be me without you

I visualize you
who I will never know,
Constant Stranger
I call you, I imagine
you when I write
and to think, you
will never know me
like the few who
I am close to, those
who say: I don't
understand what you
are talking about,
but I know what you
mean...you know
there is no other poet
on earth like me
and I know there is
no other poem in the uni-
verse just like you
and every two folks
have there own way
of loving, the poet
and the poem know
what they like, like
the kind that takes us
into different and strange
countries until we realize
at midnight, we are alone,
you and I, Constant Stranger,
anonymous mates whose love
can never be consummated.

You are fallen darkness,
the ghost ship
in the wake of a quarter-moon

Your depth
is like a blue grave
looking back
from a burial at sea

Your hands are shadows
over a campfire
lustering against the lightless
river, palms folding
like prayers over
the embering heat
of driftwood and deadfall
retreating into ash

You are heaven's shoal
of dead stars, the obsidian
lip of the shoreline
I approach without light

The shallow groundswell
of sand un-printing my tracks,
as if to refuse my sunless steps

You are streetlights left behind me
back home, softening now
beyond their dead-end streets.

a  flawless poem
if such there were,
will always be,
the next one

my poor soul,
my rag tag heart
has no censor,
so careless, reckless,
as if words were but
frivolous treasures,
easy spent, easy get

if only, how I wish I
could harvest my best,
with golden cutlery excise
the single flawless poem,
that I know in my possess

lay down this hand so weary
from cupping tears,
be satisfied at long last,
so much so,
that my casket lowered,
hands in repose companioned,
clutching his best, easing his rest,
a paper record to join his ash,
his flawless poem,
at long last

Just so you know
Pedro
was the dog
and
not the fisherman
all the same you could hear
whistling when Pedro
was in the vicinity.

Coincidentally
I whistle too.

Which brings me to the shore
to see the man who wore
the robe.

Easter,
for some the feast
and for others
the famine,

Theresa take note,
no change in conditions
and you won't be getting
anyone's
vote.

To sleep, my mind impounded,
My heartbeats, bass, lowly-sounded,
Each beat, a note upon mine ticking meter.

An unfamiliar feminine voice, not hers, poses,
Questioning noises, issued from a blackened figure.

This human-shaped metronome,
A singular inquisitor,
In rhythm, but not in rhyme,
Gravely announces repeatedly,
T'is your time, t'is your time,

Each pronouncement,
Spoken n'spiked distinctly:

"Your prose now ended,
last-gentled sweetly."

Wondering still, is it just sleep or truly death,
This forlorn eve, to go, to meet and greet,
Without having said my finale prayer.

Unprepared, thus with unaccustomed flair,
"Unfair" doth me protest, a newly-minted naysayer,
My book incomplete, black-brother frere!

If death indeed you be, my fellow cloaked-rider,
Then make me a one-last-time composer.

Let me whisper once more inside her,
A last poem of the greatest brevity,
But of the greatest import, laden heavy!

Good bye, my love, goodbye....

This closing writ, my finest ever...