To My Friend

We sought to touch the moon
Cupped hands held high
Swinging from stars
Like monkey bars

Our skin still smells of beer,
Red wine, stale sweat,
From nights we thought perpetual,
Stealing from taverns, sleeping on trains
Two drifting butterflies, frail as tendrils
Plunging like swan divers,
Ignoring the high tide

From nights of running wild,
Like careless cherubs
Bruising our knees, scraping our elbows
Drugged on art, drunk on breathing,
Always challenging The Time, The Time, The Time
Two vagrants swaying
To the cadence of young spirits

Our city will outlive us,
Its sky will shimmer silver
When our wings have torn and rusted,
Its luster, like ceaseless lanterns,
Will glow when our pores no longer swell
With passion, and our voices
Start to croak

And the fevered flesh will frost,
And my blood will dry like paste,
And age will abate the hunger,
And the perennial quest,
And I will crumble knowing nothing
As absolute as friendship

The Time has finally come
Fulfilling its belated promise,
Severing the stem from the root
Like a child plucks the petals
From the most beautiful of flowers 

Transition

They say that Time cleanses
Wounds, like waves lick the shore,
But my chest is charred by memory,
My flesh has scars like carcass
Seething from within the skin
Like fresh blisters, or splinters
That won’t surface from the tissue
Of my fingers

I cannot see fishes in this sea
I said
It is black as oil and thick as night
I said
Don’t you know the blind must be led?

And I have found no oysters
But shovels to carve the ground
With holes as wide as bodies
Of water, where I lay my dreams
To drown

There is no warning to treason
But I forget
Life cannot be fought with reason
But I forget 

A Poem for the One

We Fought

With our banners raised
High, like flailing flags
Extended arms
Rupturing the sky
Brows soaked in sweat
Tears thick as raindrops
Shoulders, like boulders
Rubbing, close
Like marching men
Wounds gashed, infected
Deep as bomb craters
Anthems, arrhythmic pleas
Like dehydrated hearts 

We meant to occupy

Not bend or bow
Before pellets or pistils
Nor crack or cry
Before bombs or batons
But attack with books,
Veins gorged with verses,
The prose in our palates,
Spitting meter and rhyme

We are sorry

If famished faces offended
If our boots, layered with dirt
Perturbed the sensibility
of Liberty Square
But our troops did not know
Marble, it knew mud
Did not know
Castles, it knew fences 
We knew
Failure, not chances
We knew
Pain, not romances
We knew
Hierarchy, poor circumstances
Not opportunity
      
          not democracy

So we fought
With wits for weapons
We occupied
Like squads in war
And we are not sorry