WHEN YOU LEARNED OF MY NAME
10 years ago was me to this place and nothing mattered much but that I could drink and the liquor store so close to my house and Food Lion for beer. Still I wrote with feriocious intensity; love lost and forlorn of fantasies never formed. And memories too; the drunken pounding of fingers to the keyboard on my new color screen computer. I can remember sending you the poems though I can’t remember which ones they were or what you might have known when you learned of my name. I was anybody else at the time and you didn’t know about all of the wine or how I came to men or who was why I am. And I didn’t know you were someone real housed in a castle of empties casting your net onto the page from the Dead Man’s chair. Conversations ensued we can not even remember, memory not being too important as the holy now and even now that is so. There is no time and yet enough time, all of the world’s time and no roles or expectations to grow one’s hair long or shave off a beard. Who we are now and what has been heard when nothing was said, but still I wonder does he know and I hear him in my mind saying yes a thousand times I am saying nothing so loud, and even covering my smile poker faced as the dream is coming forward and the painting of the moon is mine and that school and that park and that is exactly yes and all the ashes in my car or the bowl of vomit left two days now at the foot of the table is nothing compared to nothing compared to nothing compared to.
