Poem

Do you ever feel like life has piled too much on you for you to stand still - where the only movement you can make is to run? Where running til you defeat yourself seems like the only way to walk home? Here's a poem from this summer when I had a time like that. Exhausting myself couldn't alleviate my hurt or shame - or cool the residue of an inarticulate question that burned inside. But landing on a step in an embrace with a strung-out homeless girl brought me to a place of grace - us to a place of grace - of healing and rebuilding.

I am the mild madman artist
whose humming delusionary dreams
she wiped away with her porcelain hands,

whose life of poems and pennies
roads and flowers contrasts her made-up whirlwind
of a concrete life.

I am he whose fire burns myself out
as I run into the moon-ringed frantic of this hungry summer night.

Running past the lazy belch of gravelly laughter
my chucks splash flowing oil rainbows.
                 Puddled playlands disturbed,
                 rats' tails slip down
                 sunken stoops -
                 brownstones
                 scaffolded with fire escapes.

                 Where does fire escape?
                 Adrenaline, muscle and teary-eyed teeth
                 navigate constellations of electric stars,
                 pushing through,
                 pulsing through
                 the Lower East Side.

                 Anaerobic respiration
                 heightens desperation

                and a breathless clench-jawed prayer
                that I had wings of a dove -
                that a cellar door were a springboard catapult - and I,
                          grateful projectile,
                          in the dreamscape jump of freeflight explosion.

But I am a vacuum subdued with implosive fatigue
and the shrapnel of my thoughts
            sparkles on the sidewalk - letters that no longer spell -
            clinking into a pile of quiet, shiny confusion in Alphabet city

            where you slump to the ground,
            where you've written my heart on your cardboard: Please help.

            I am the brokenness
            in your bleary and sun-beaten eyes,
            in your Benzedrine and booze-soaked brain.

           Squat in your doorway;
           holding you in your Revlon drool,
           lollipop tattoo
           and uncovered bruise -
           I am the tenderness of every man who has held you huddled in a corner of shame.

           Squat in your doorway;
           in these whispered shudders
           of weeping -
           you are the return of one who walked away.

We are lost
but we are here,
and this is home -
where grace begins.