Call it a betrayal if you wish
but perhaps I'm older now
or a tad more rough around the edges
or perhaps or maybe the zeroes behind my miles
has at last caught up with me,
but I've no more room for talk
or to be filled with the faux ennui
that it takes to be noticed.
I prefer now the city avenues,
the sidewalk cafes where the revolutions begin,
it's here, where the beautiful women in their tight blue dresses
walk past me, sliding through my smoke
like a Goddess through the mists,
here where the buildings are ancient
and the streets are older.
Because I have gone too far,
stood up and protested,
marched and threatened
while the hip and hippies
sat and whispered their bitcheries,
rolled their back porch joints
and hid from the pigs.
Call me bored,
but still more crooked than you,
for seeking my illumination
on the city buses,
the cobblestones,
all the things of the world
that are the soul of movement.
My feet are weary
and my pack too heavy,
and yet I am still too strong to sit
and talk away the hours that are left to me,
or perhaps I no longer have the will
to compare, to De-construct,
to define in black and white
what it means to be alive.
My coffee spoons are laid on the table,
and I am home from the searing lights.
Can I still call myself a poet
though I no longer look on the works with disgust?
I wish that I could make it simple,
but simplicity is a myth with no moral,
and the worlds are far too complex to ignore.
I'll not lay down my quill or push aside the paper aside,
because I am who I have always been, only more.
A drunk I've been,
a back row stoner,
the one to stand on the tracks and declare,
the one who sits silent in symphony halls,
and the one who cries when Belle kisses the Beast-
Call me what you will oh artistes,
I am no defined by myself:
poet, man, father, worker,
ex-husband and friend-
all refusing coalescence
into what has always been wanted.
