resting my head on the belly of the Buddha…my soul taking breath from Kerouac…Whitman…Henry Miller…I was 33…the year Christ crucified…

finding peace in words…sentences tripping off the tongue…read aloud on street corners…in bars…in bedrooms that go for $150 a week with the toilet down the hall and Carl the Cockroach serving as your bellhop…

Cancer…Capricorn…Dharma Bums…I sing the body electric…notes hit in accordance…sympatico…all poets come together…prophets preaching while only a chosen few hear the wisdom…2000 years of thoughts and meditations moving among us…who will take heed…

the mystics…the magicians…placing wonder before our eyes…and the non-believers scoughing, I won’t be fooled…not I…

and in the corner of a church a book of poems by Dumas lay in wait to be read…and it continues to lay there…no pages turned…

for shame….