From walking the Soho streets by night
to put up poetry gig posters,to motorcycling thousands of solitary miles,
brooding over grief, with no home to go back to,
this is a rise-and-fall-and-rise story,
a bouillabaisse of adventures,
and all the girls I've loved before;
this is mine, and I call it fine, gone life.
but I knew I would get there.
We live on a loop until we get it right;
maybe I can correct the errors
in future editions of myself.
Elizabethan revenge tragedies...
Great poetry doesn’t always come from great poets:
Sometimes it takes losers, hacks, junkies, crooks:
Every punk rock pugilist has a story to tell.
Nobody in this story gets rich,
or even seems to break even —
all anyone gets out of the experience
is a few dozen excellent poems.
And that ends up being enough.
What, you were expecting a cozy romance?
This is eminent hipster domain,
the opposite of the great escape,
yet something about this fate seems fitting
for a hell of a story-teller, on the scene for key moments,
just a kid with a shared passion
for the practical magic of making things
with poignant details about hardscrabble existence.