November Poems

THE LOST POET

for Klaus Mann

I open your journal

haunted by exile

tears in ink, far from home

now gone forever,

sentences write out your sentence

along a geography of terror

speak up!

shout!

fight!

deliver!

flee!

But the pages have lost their soul

their voice in time

Europe bled,

cigarette burns on your desk

typewriter waits, neon light enters your room

New York City a lonely hunter tonight

you sleep on marble looking up

to a sky once known…

I SAW YOUR BEAT GHOST

Walking along the Broadway Tunnel

whistling poetry of the gutter

skipping over whiskey bottles filled with meter

modernity behind,

your words painted nothing

there’s no place to hang your memories

I followed taking notes,

Poets are ghosts from hell or was it Purgatory?

we could meet at a bar, sit and chat

with the living, with the ghosts of words

we would be strangers

we would be mute witnesses to each other’s world

while our lexicons clash!

Dead poet turn and walk back up the tunnel

with all your dead friends,

San Francisco is our city of raindrops, movement

of poems yet unwritten

where we write the kiss remembered

the book whose last line keeps escaping…