I was sleepless and afraid to sleep.
What was was, what is is. I’ve known
the search for love so dire, so desperate
I met a lover who fucked, he said,
the cavity of a raw chicken, plucked,
he could not tell if it was hen, or metaphor.
I was Seaman Third Class in the US Navy,
my shipmate, surname “Love,” asked me to write
a letter to his girlfriend in popular songs.
I wrote, “I’ll see you in apple blossom time.”
Killed, his head was bloody applesauce.
He did not die for a single thought, or metaphor.
His cause: the right to love and pub crawl
along the old Bowery under the elevated trains,
drunk, the right to stroll, fall, get up.
He protected the rights of others
to cross-dress on the Way of the Cross.
A single ant carries a heavy burden
to an anthill, fragment of a breadcrumb.
Will a blind ant be given equal justice by God
with Johann Sebastian Bach playing his Fugues
and Preludes in brick Lutheran churches?
The wish to give and receive is necessary
as breathing in and breathing out.
Heart beats, regular and irregular, are heaven sent.
My heart beat is allegro staccato,
whereas my kidney and liver are agnostic.
Friends of my kidney, death is justice.
Are there studies, studios, fields and factories,
working places in paradise?
* * *
I’ve also tried to oversleep history.
Around the corner, with artificial organs,
our lives may be long as we choose.
Still we shall succumb because our mechanics
and melancholy need something like grease, not blood.
Perhaps otherwise, multilingual death comes
when metaphor and reality come together.
Old hearts have a purpose, a continuing need
to hold reality and justice in a single thought.
May there still be Sundays of life.
—2018