Some Anecdotes Without Evidence

For Patrick Kurp

Everybody blogs, and every right writes every day,
So much of the little they have to say
Goes round in circles, like the colors of our cars,
In the earthly panorama that always stops at who we are,

And sometimes at George Hamilton, or heroin, if chance
Will favor us the slot we always play, spun up like a trance,
The pulse of all we never really needed known
We cannot live as our own, and cannot really do as we are shown,

So the models are all broken: Lindsay Lohan,  starved
To live as child without a childhood, addict superstar
(Or superstar addict), who dumps her shame on the public
And pays good people to take care of the waifs she has picked.

The circle goes around like this, souls find such joy
In millionaire boys with deadly toys from angry streets
Who get their trap stars back, summon orgies in their sheets
Most every night; play a children's game that we, we all watch.

We've lost our sense of ethics, our inherent valor,
(At least since Michael Jackson's hair went out on fire),
So we leave great thoughts to specialists, to "talk among themselves,"
And act like any businessman, say it doesn't pay to delve,

When we're young again and free, to surf pornography

And dream away our lives without the key

That James revolved and Chekov named, 

Time's prizes, without shucking or shame.

It turned to love anyway in time. You toil in words 

As others toiled in stone, who shaped their world 

In books with inner light, for those who still dare, to read.

Someone in the would-be towers feels that piquant need

To noodle with a would-be feather, by would-be candle,
To conjure like a wizard all the books that he can handle,
To show how all the finest thoughts connect us every day
As we bake our bread, try to make our memories stay.

                           Your words are like a surgeon's,
Surrounding without reaching the disease. But purging,
Nevertheless, though it feels a birth beginning every morning,
As words go ever tumbling through the skies -- who has the time

To catch them? Yet you find them in the vast, akashic vaults

And scatter with my buttered toast their salts

You've carried like the hermit who found Lot

Preserved for everyone who wouldn't look.

The writer -- has no duties -- but to put down on the page

The truth to be forgiven, the beauty left to age.