a guy

after 140 different reasons

couldn’t unravel his unlocked door

posed

as

a

brickbreaker-

he

had

escaped

from

some

remote

fishing village

off

the

coast

of

Maine

but unable to reckon

how the drips all leaked together,

while drowning gasping choruses

desperately voicing the necessities of his life,

his final breaths illuminated that last long dusty tunnel

with 140 letters from the alphabet

(5 years later in an abandoned field

I came upon a primitive brick wall

roughly erected in the shape of a cross,

perhaps these ruins from someone's past life)

Maine

1981