PASSER -BY

Passer- by my city

a Beat poet with gentle proofs

welcomes you with a candle
returning to my past
half ghost voices going higher up
to his apartment for a reading
while resting in forgiveness

here beside a rock garden wall
near a sandlot playground

where the hounded
throw stones at the wounded

the night watchman arrives
on the fire escape
who barely catches sleep

in the deepest part of Babylon

where there are no hours

to stop the lights 

between the taxi screens
and screams of cab calls
hailing its daily emergencies
near this poet's old hang out
in his adolescent years
outside a dance floor
as voyagers play jazz
on faceless Sixties nights
over the Brooklyn Bridge
quoting Ginsberg and Crane

on wisteria street walls
filled with young graffiti
as a Gothic young Edgar Poe
dressed up at carnival time
in black clogs
jogs by though the shadows

who refuses to pardon his past
putting his tongue out
as Oz's scarecrow

insists he is a futurist
as a breathless witness

of a world of art now gone

by summoning memory

which leaves you hungry
feeling in temporary distress
and powerless,

suddenly the big media sends
drones above us
eyeing a five star actor

once in TV soap operas
who signs off
on his former contract
suddenly appears
for an outside audition
in a summer playhouse
of Shakespeare in the park
wishing for bravos
and autographs from a chorus

in radiant darkness on stones
like a loner Odysseus
returning home
having been in exiled perdition
after sailing the seas
now hearing an oboe wind
reciting life verses of Homer
about the human condition
awaiting his lover
and wife Penelope.