A Brief Freedom

For My Friend B.B.

1970-2012


Death is inevitable here, my friend. As sure as rape and theft and overcrowded subways, death, for some of us, is just a station stop away. If we’re lucky… if we’re Blessed, Life slows down a piece... and grants us a sweet reprieve. It is released inside this freedom of poetry.

My Highest, Most Greatest Good is a dueling dream. It is fueled by the urgent SCREAM heard from others expectations of me, versus, this unquenchable hunger, this insatiable thirst of my undying ambition. Quite simply: I am a slave to this shit.

In the frosted fields between the sheets of my sleep, I am haunted by this duality. It is always hiding, like a shy ghost, inside of my deepest self. Life, for me, has been this journey through streets of Sadness and Euphoria, with a brief but necessary escape inside the plains of poetry.

And I’ve known some poets... Real Poets... such Beautiful, Living, Breathing Poets; scribes so much Higher and Greater than me.

And after living their heroic little lives, they’ve died their invisible deaths.

This weekend someone else’s earthly suffering came to an end. This weekend, another poet friend of mine expired.


Today, once again, Life for me has become this brief excursion into the freedom of poetry.

I am reminded of how some vile thing or some monstrous entity always comes along to kill this poetry in us.

Death, it just keeps chasing us, stalking us, walking beside, and then, running after us.

Death by winter... in a cold-shouldered America. Death by failure’s sharp and jagged needle. Death by trigger-fingered cop. Death by a city’s speeding stopwatch. Death by some incorrect, mistaken identity. Death by some ignorant-assed vigilante. Death by merciless abject poverty. Death by a lonely man’s disease. Death by some obscene and unnatural cause will come for us, just as it came for him…

And we will grieve.

As blackly beautiful and brilliant as he was, his life should have never been cut so damned brief! I get it, though. I do. Between us there are few differences. We are bittersweet slaves to an Art, a Mistress, and to a World of thieves that will ultimately betray us! I get it!

Life, for me, is this brief and tragic hesitation. I fill in the gaps and gaping holes with broken prose and poetry.

His life was terse, composed of heavy heart and crying verse. His life, it should have been a song. Instead it proved to be... a broken stanza... an aborted passage.

Yo! Would someone please throw him a jazz funeral, damn it!





And send him home most righteously! Let those dark cherubic-faced men blow their horns through the streets for him!

Celebrate him! His life! His gift! Speak poems, say odes, sing hymns to his spirit! And then, being that we are such carelessly foolish humans, we’ll forget just what made his soul so rich and special, so unique, and beautiful.


It happens all the time. I’ve seen this shit happen to my own father; the way people just forget the Shine from his Star. I’ve come to expect nothing more, nothing less than this, for it is his plight, and my plight, and perhaps all of our plights.


My Highest Good is a dueling dream. It is fueled by the urgent scream of divergent expectations of me. It remains this unquenched, insatiable thirst of undying ambition. In the frosted fields of my sleep, I am haunted by this duality.

Life, for me, has mostly been this reed-thin freedom I find in poetry.

Life, for me, has mostly been this reed-thin freedom I find in poetry.

LIFE, for me, has mostly been this reed-thin freedom I find in poetry.


I wish you golden days and lyrical nights of radiant riffs and open mics and Gabriel blowing Cool Jazz on his horn... and from the neon-lit clouds on the hipper side of Heaven, I wish you Thunderous fingersnaps.


That's it. That's all.

Au revoir, Bonne nuit, Mon Ami.


One.