Speaking Into the Smoke

Speaking Into the Smoke 

I came up to you, spoke, but never seen

Standing there in overcoats smoke ballooning out our mouths

Cold January day, coffee inside and basting in the black-brick night  

Jet hair pinned and debonair, uptown-style and rooted halls

Of where you have been if this is an answer instead of another question

Leading route to vagabond thoughts and monster balls

Dance a dance and dress the costume sayings  

To be who a life is not just to count the numbers dot to dot

Circuitous and pack the logic of a thousand lifetimes into the prize

Of heading through the entry door to an old-folk stomp

Of a tambourine man stolen from the world by cigarettes  

Love’s escape into a board game, toss the dice

And we have tonight to spoil the risk or dare the bliss

Of warmer eyes and narrower straights, sail the rocks and break the ranks

Of prison ropes and dire fates  

I asked what are a handful of acts that make your happiness?

The pieces of the puzzle scattered about the skull lapping there like rainbows

Waiting to be shown across the iris into another shore  

I asked to see what makes your soul glow naked in your own basket’s light?

When the shadows are dancing and a man is but another day

To wander, there is you giggling at happenstance shaking hands with the dark

Knowing life is a crow’s cough shoulder-landed and speaking rough  

I asked you about your sense of adventure, what that means in terms

Of singular or dual where the world splits like light itself into a mirror fading

The image of whom you remember no longer being into who you are

In agreement for the gambler and the thief, the fair days and those of deceit  

I asked you the saddest and brightest day of drunken kindness you have ever done

To give of the hearth when you may have needed the sum?

To be in position to see the division of another breaking and need not offer,

But meat off the bone did lie.  
 

I asked you if you knew what it meant to write so you do not have to remember?

I asked you if you have seen through time’s wormhole, the other side of purpose

The mystery of the search, the interconnected one

And in that you came and took my hand smiled and said  

I am here.  I see.  I am listening.  Let us speak into the darkness together.