no EXIT

Once,

when you looked out from your subterranean eyes

gazing past infinite doors filled like paint tubes with possibilities,

you figured you could spend your time being free,

inside and outside,

loving her or him,

portraying a liberated child,

playing in treehouses

with ponies below chewing chestnut leaves

as more eager surprises

showered around your long peanutbutter hair.

Before,

you intuitively knew aliveness,

you were hip to Jazz Music,

drank with Dolphy and Coltrane

Monk, Miles, and Max Roach,

improvising in and around all the crazy harmonies

laying down tattooed street rhythms

playing inside and around your hear,

and we swelled along with your spirit.

So tell us,

what happens when the band hops off the train?

jumps onto another star to embrace,

some other sun,

when all the time you are the star?

The Painted Vision of the Sun.

Then one night,

we walked into Vincent's life-size painting,

a tired and death gray painting,

a twisted portrait pre-meditated,

commissioned by some terrified city caretaker

caffeine rapping to us non-stop all about the Artist's Death.

Hey, Didn't You Teach Us We All Are Gods?

Miserable,

certainly bleak, but you still had yourself,

you said later,

and we decided:

“that’s just another sky full of ripe yellow corn to harvest!”

So,

who is really the searcher?

who is this harvester of visions?

and who must be the elegant slave?

WHERE IS THE EXIT?

Never,

had we thought of you as some unfinished letter…just some name in a phonebook…

Instead,

we sensed splendor in your voice.

we were told you had to make some necessary decisions about your life

affecting others who voyaged around you,

planets around a sun,

other worlds who loved your Strength

yet understood you were isolated,

resonating inside your own essence,

a survivor,

an island

unpopulated.

But,

today that is a past flow,

endured by dreamers

who lost your letters in the flood,

who cannot decide to fall down or stand up,

whose night of promise to your heart ended

when you drew your first “straight” line

while unable to recall all of the straight lines

drawn for you all these years,

rusted lines more petrified than alive

that together formed the circle

that encompasses you here.

Now,

you exist devoid the richness of the brown and black woods,

the rise and crash of the Rockaway Ocean.

Instead,

the Artist has been gorged,

violated.

swallowed by your own reflection from his eyes

so that there is no exit for you.

Tonight,

we kneel broken without empathy,

having seen the inside of another closing door

without warning.

Yes,

you still have not forgotten surprises,

sailing ship riffs inside a simple lovely chord progression.

Yet No,

never to forget your wide open Songs,

those last remaining ones that truly were your own,

so very free,

and easy.

Wayne, NJ

5/5/73