In some strange way like rivers of passion that flow up mountains of destiny
I knew you cared at age fifteen when you snatched me out of that punk rock club
away from the multi-color-haired-nose-pierced grandeur chaotic display before us
pleading for your acceptance of an art beyond the portraits hanging on the walls
in Frank Lloyd Wright’s den of yesteryear.
“Come on man, just stay and listen to the music. It’s art!” as you pushed him aside
I felt that steel pulsed grip resurfacing back from all your railroad years
around my arm, snarling, “We’re leaving”
I remember puzzled eyes grow in the distance and Tristana,
who can forget Tristana, my first love, waving goodbye for the last time.

Fifteen years later, I’m sitting here on a doorstep three-thousand miles from you
in search of the word, when I realize it was so close, reading your letter
enclosed with a subscription check for another year’s worth of POESY Magazine
the rag I found at that youthful time to wipe away the blackened blood around my heart… “Brian, Another great issue. The poems were well selected and I could relate to Ed,
the guy you interviewed, in such a way that…”
and so it went with the files in the top drawer of remembrance.

Sometimes it is just you and I sitting at the kitchen table piecing together cut up poems
torn from the narrow realms of society and all its importance, but usually it is just me,
staring one too many minutes into the cracks in the sidewalks wondering
which direction they are pointing at now.

They are not pointing at the gates of Harvard you drove me through
that same night in the club.

They are not pointing to homebound intentions
with the one woman I have managed to still make laugh after six years
of feeling the blade can’t run deep enough to cut my heart out for her.

They are not big enough, large enough, and again, deep enough to loose my footing
on the narrow one-way streets of tomorrow I walk alone.

No matter how many times I loose myself down one-way streets with no name
in cities of forgotten faces with no mouths who scream from the inside,
you always knew I like to take the long way home.