I want to pay homage
to the busted streets and broken cottages,
where everyday people are destroyed
with lies and filthy promises.

You see, these are my streets
that I walked with my feet,
Brothers and sisters,
graffiti tagged and full of disease.

This is the place where I broke bones,
Layed down sidewalks full of racial undertones,
With guns ablazing and
suicides growing old.

Gang signs tagged on every street corner,
did you hear the gun shot?
Stop!!!
Yellin' loud I tried to warn ya

Mama, why does it always have to be?
I lost another brother here by my feet.
I am filled with emotions
now gone with deceit

God, Please stop this pain that
flows inside my veins,
the agony, the injury, the silence
the insane.

I can't continue one more step,
this place I call my home
has turned into a wreck.
Lives are destroyed, twisted and upset.

So, look around.
This is my neighborhood.
This is where I belong.
With the busted up sidewalks, I stand strong.

We can not turn back time,
we can only help correct lives.
So let's turn the pages people
and unite not divide.

This is a place of unequivocal cantor.
Where the true poets amuse their audience
from a broken, exploited stage of compassion and sympathy.

A simple stage, where many have fumbled, stumbled and even crumbled.

Just to get up and do it again.

Where many a simple poets have waited and waited, nervously on the sidelines of the underlit bar, waiting for their turn to trip their way up to this stage

Where many a simple poets rustled with each letter of each piece they wanted to perform, hoping they didn't crash and burn

Where a single, frightening stage light burned
holes into their souls as they stuttered
through the stanzas and verse of their careful crafted pieces of art.

Where they tripped their way up to that stage one last time, because they had one too many glasses of wine to drink just so they could spread their wings and fly

And fly they did.

This was the beginning.

Where it all started.

This is, also, where it ends.

A final moment.

This is the moment that can define a poet.

Where poets become human once again and the clock on the wall slowly ticks toward closing time.

So with one final sip of wine, one final piece of their heart, one final chapter of their life written and placed before you, I bid you ado.

This is it

Their last time on this stage and now they can go home.

~
for T.M.R.
~

We find our poems in many different ways.  Of late,
I keep finding inspiration in the public and private messages that many of you send to me, regarding poems I choose to publish here.

So I repeat my disclaimer,
"any message you send, can and will be used as a poem."
~

instant recognition at levels so deep within,
what are the odds, given the enormous differentials,
that the kin in kindred, would blossom across two lives,
where the oppositional factoids are exceptional

as if seeded in the fertile soil of the blank spaces,
between each of our poem's words and verses,
there secreted for each other, but gleaming visible
for all to see and uncover, even join in,
uncovering semi-hidden insertions and assertions of affinity

I confess

she stands behind me ofttimes in my mind, silently,
suggesting, reflecting, critiquing a word choice,
a nuanced pressure upon the hand redirecting,
with infiltrating suggestions imaginary

oh wordy me, four stanzas excised,
abstracted from the memories contained within my fingertips,
this, an accolade to the pleasuring of humanizing mystery connectivity,
when she, in the depth of her stylized brevity,
captures more than I, after hours of exercised trying,
in the succinct excalibur of her comprehension

*"We are an unstated understood"