His memory comes back—a frozen dot—
Just like dry ice that burns both cold and hot.
I thought the poems I sent would make him melt.
Instead, he only reads below the belt.
He wants a home, a love, another start.
Yet comes a colder place disclosed by art.
The more I live, the more inexorable are fools.
The world’s work requires the proper tools.
They talk and laugh and smoke and talk and smoke.
Then off to bed—let’s see, who gets the joke.
Look, Adonis sits at the table over there—
He reads alone—I wish I were his chair.
It’s odd how eyes that roam like little spies
Are nailed in their place by other eyes.
It rises again, the blood tide, the balloon.
I thought I was cured, but it is too soon.
The body is the soul’s demanding wife.
That harps, ‘A life in death, a death in life.’
The broken hearted sleep on straw and stone.
And dream the books they need to live alone.
What youth will have a poet of ash and dust?
The one who bleeds and find his blood is rust.
Robert Klein Engler lives in Chicago and New Orleans. Just google his name to find his writing on the Internet.