Elegy for Bob Kaufman

I.

The difference between pleasant
and peasant is a quick ride
on the L. Bone blue window
of the soul, we know that song,
don’t we?
Birth of the Cool?
A cold lineage of pain.
The fist is only one flower
in a bouquet of hurt. Tell me,
do your eyes tumble
like dice down the secret
alley of the mind? I will scale
the question mark
of your spine. Sisyphus,
eternally rolling a fat ball
of hoodoo back to what
you do best – selling kingdoms
of sound to tongue-broke kings.

II.

Bob Kaufman is dead
and somehow the snow, too, is dead.
Silent. White. Skeletal envy.
Bird floats behind my eyelids
like the last bit of symphony
caught between a theatre’s revolving door
and winter. The wind is a brush over snare.
The 51 makes love to a pothole. High hat.
“All The Things You Are” plays
not a memory, but a streak of faces
against a bus window. To say this hurts
is to call the cold bitter. Who then,
can blame the street for its salt?