Elegy for Lenny Walden

I wanted to preserve and share this somewhere, so here ya be, world wide cobweb thing.

Elegy for Leonard Walden

What am I to do now with your daily bread, Lennie?

You whom I loved amongst those countless pages of endless books, ten

   lifetimes drug out over three lonely years

   in this language of love we keep warm with words.

   You with whom, for a little while, I shared a life outside of time inside

the freewheelin' Lenny Walden

      this city’s balk and banter, inbetween the ditches of a mighty life.

What am I to do with these flocks of shoes, soles worn, heels hard?

   You whose sullied but shining countenance would light the dimmest of

      dungeons on the darkest of nights alone downtown amid mountains.

   You whose carefree gifting brought too much love too far to too few folk

      over far too little time, today we wear our weariness proudly for you,

      O man of the shifty boulevard and dimestore deal,

O saint of hangovers and 4^th avenue delirium and smashed cans of soup.

To you who could be alone in crowds I raise a glass, I raise every glass

   to you who could not very well hold your own.

I wish to dream of you and soon, to see your lazy figure walking

wholly towards me in the dusk of our pooled memories.

   As I drag my feet down the sidewalk, thinking of your loping gait

and drunken grin my eye turns to tiny movements, crows in alleyways, lengthening shadows of the tops of buildings that could resemble that scraggly dagger of a sandpaper chin. Apparitions assail me from all sides, I see your beautiful countenance leering up at me from puddles or through thrift store windows. As I shop the discount carts at the bookstores and library sales I’ll see your hand sliding in from some acute angle to snatch at a musty old tome I have yet to see and would surely cherish but when I turn to catch your crafty electric cackle of a gaze it’s someone else who does not smile and usually looks away, book abandoned.

  

    The shapes your hands took on an eerie otherworldliness to ,

   casting shadows on the walls of my subconscious that stuck.

for kymberly and lisa

and here's Long Haired David's two cents:

http://www.olywip.org/archive/page/article/2005/07/10.html