There’s grinning ghost-poets
riding fancy saddles down
abandoned hotel hallways,

a red rooster
wrestling a baby kingsnake,

a cat caught in the hen house
and a shiftless, no-good drifter
cooling in the jailhouse.

There’s a broken-down truck
afloat on an ocean of golden wheat
beneath a swirling coal-black sky.

There’s a foolish old rowboat
sulking in the bed of a creek
that’s long since run dry
(still waiting after all these years
for the creek to reappear).

And here’s the part
where one of our own dearly departed
is carried down an inner-city street
on a swollen river of laughter and tears,
trumpets, tambourines, and slide trombones,
farther and farther out, towards some still
greater (as yet) unknown.

And what about that Rasputin of a character
down in his subterranean lair,
sculpting zodiac animals from spirits
of fire and air?

And way up there, just above the city skyline,
goes the Man With All The Answers,
wafting away to some faraway land, most likely,
on a deus ex machina made of wanderlust,
bailing wire and gull’s wings,

leaving us a world of mysteries
that may very well remain unanswered
forever more (forever more, forever more).

Before anyone can catch their breath, even,
comes the big budget scene where the stadium
floor of the world’s latest collective dream
(of whatever’s passing, these days, for peace,
love and understanding) suddenly blows
and drops out from beneath it all,

and we tumble and fall,
tumble and fall,
tumble and fall,

like starfish,
like rag dolls,
like satellites spiraling, drunkenly,
out of their orbits,

off into the sleepy, wakening yawn
of a nebula, the stellar semblance
of a giant rose a million years wide
and the color of peach ice cream.

Somewhere, a pay phone
by the side of a desert highway
begins to ring.

Somewhere, a tattoo of Chet Baker
begins to bleed.