Emerging from the winter
Wakes you up to the cold

He was a good man

Remember him as a good person

Always with a smile that made itself

And a joke tucked safe in his pocket

Next to his battered pack of cigarettes



Remember him as a good person

Just a day away from reaching himself

Trying to find the softer shade

That wraps itself around the next tree along



Remember him as a lost person

When is wallet ran dry to his thirst

That struck deeper than any bar could reach

He would strike up a match and swallow down

Some rich cotton wool smoke

And waited for his patience to fray.



Remember him as a lost person

With boots scuffed from the kick of the earth

And licked over with layers of old dust

With eyes that peered out, wrapped beneath

Layers of worried wrinkling skin

But with hands soft enough to keep his word

And straight teeth that remembered

The taste of unvarnished youth.



Remember him as a good person

Who lost his questions in haystacks

Where they were too safe from answers

And the answers he found, Were distorted in glass

Till he didn't want any around.

I don't know what this says about me but..

I’ve always had a subtle kind of loathing
Held in special reserve for those
Self-promoting reporters
Who on first blush appear simple agents of the daily news
But in reality breathe the stuff of endings.
And feed off our collective emotional conscience.
Always earching for the next tear jerking tear jerker
And the irony is, the more we cry the less we feel
Till our ducts are held hostage by each new day’s
Grander homage to
Some nobody that nobody knew,
And nobody cared about
Who had the good fortune to die in a way that left some shine in his name
To be gobbled up like candy by the ever circling vultures
Who can smell these corpses a mile away
And whose pens cut deeper than any talons or beak that nature ever made

I for one, would care to die in obscurity
Whatever faint glow my passing leaves behind
Gently decaying amongst my dreams
As they too are reborn
Composted into new vitality
Under the fingers of a new mind
One who gives a damn. One who knows
One who cares about
The intangible stuff that fortune tries to pluck away from our names
To be carried aloft like the green olive shoots
Grasped in the delicate claws of Noah’s dove
A messenger, crying in silent voice “New lands ahoy!”