if I write you a poem, will you make me a pastrami

sandwich? (if it’s not too much trouble, a little mustard.)

& coffee, black: cream is fattening, & sugar won’t make

me any sweeter.

I have only poems for barter. my gold has vanished,

because it was gold, & has no permanence, as Robert

Frost explained. my tears were crystal, & were fashioned

into wind chimes, for the children of travelling parents.

& gone is the field I wandered in, to be among flowers,

to sit beneath the story tree, as Nature whispered to me

an ode to drifting clouds, to the ribbons in her hair…

I have only my tattered jeans, reeboks with frayed laces, a

poet’s shirt, blue & oversized, to harbor a searching heart.

and I have my poet spirit.

I have abandoned the old house. the rooms were much too

big, & loneliness is large enough.

I have taken a small flat in American Bohemia.

the ghosts there will teach me how to be a poet.