What courage, love?
What strength among the mad
close enough to hear you breathe?

What beauty, mouth?
Rolling and twisting
with a thousand years of history you never learned

We're pushing fifty into suburbia as the sun sets over a sea of cars
backed up and spilling into the sky

I think of drawing pictures on the pier
dreaming of Picasso

Waiting tables spilling drinks
scrawling on napkins and newspapers
full of frantic inspiration

Sucking dry the bitter bones
of what remains when the vultures have all gone

It is beauty and sickness
not a spiral but an arc
rising and dropping
silver to ash
when you land
somewhere below the sun

AcB 9.21.01