the best metaphor ever:
"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;"

—William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2/7[1]
-~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
for Ernest L. Gonzales,
an overdue uncommissioned tribute

~
mined the meta data,
mined the meta world,
for the meta~for,
the truth serum ether
that gives me a breather,
turns out Willie's
meta-rumination
spot on, the boy's dotty
meta~ruination

no longer my eyes see
your eye test chart lettered reality,
tears of alpha~poetry all I got,
cloudy visionary
with wordy meatballs reigning,
charting a schooner's course,
on a Texas-sized ocean of poetic reality

police took away my licenses.

illegal for me have both,
they, city~proclamation proclaimed,
driving and poetry~striving simultaneously,
dangerous for life and limb,
claiming I drove like
I was in a poetry slam video game,
had to explain I was trapped
in the world of poetic-reality

where the alpha~words
afloating in the atmosphere,
imagery balloons preventing
crystalline vision,
so one or the other,
this world of mine,
the world of poetic reality,
is my baggage carried
and a foot in both
worlds  be word dangerous for global health

ticketed for doing 85+
in the left poetry fast lane,
judge disallowed my only excuse,
mentally composing multiple haikus,
and needed my fingers and toes to do
syllable counting

now you know why
I write poetry on the bus

no, the kid kids you not,
the only arrest on record for
poetry-composing intoxication
under the influence,
while operating an
auto~mobile ma~chine

Went to the bodega
for some late night vanilla swirl,
the immigrant behind the counter,
at 2:00 am, gave me my change
in tales from Bangladesh

late for work,
took me a fat taxi,
the driver, a city life comber~climber,
asked credit or cash,
and I said kind sir,
you do me great credit,
if a poem in Urdu
you would recite in lieu of payment

now you know why
I write poetry on the bus

So, my dear Ernest,
life is our poetic reality,
you are the best ever metaphor,
the one poets keep stealing from
each other,
at the intersection
of our eyes crossing

in fact,
ole Willie stole the world's most famous
metaphor's inspiration above,
when me and he,
once pub crawling,
we disagreed if a certain door
was the pub entrance or the exit,
and the next day
in a burst of
Poetic Reality,
he composed-stoked stole them words,
in a hangover haze

*so the poet point be this:
we may live in and of this world gritty,
but the only show
we ever know'd
was turning life
into the poetic one