Poem.
Do they write poems when they have something to say,
something to think about?
Robbed from the world's hard rubbing
and the excess of every day.
The summer I was 24 in San Francisco, you and I were gay.
The whole summer seemed like a cable car ride
over the gold Bay.
But once in a bistro, angry at one another
we quarreled about a taxi fare.
I doubt that it was the fare we quarreled about,
but one excuse is as good as another
in the excess of passion and the need to be worn away.
Do they know what is cleanliness of skin,
firmness of flesh that matters?
It is so difficult to look at the deprived
or smell their decay.
But now I am among them.
I too I'm a leper, a warning.
I hold out my crippled fingers.
My voice flatters everyone who comes
this way in the weeds of mourning, groaning and gnashing.
I display myself in malodorous comic wrappings and tatters
and the excess of passion and the need to be worn away.