CONEY ISLAND GUY

for Lou Reed


“Pass through the fire up ahead,”
One I wanted to be my friend said.

Lou you somehow plugged in to the machine
music for all our dreams, “a bit of magic in
everything, and some loss to even things out.”

When you passed on to the other side I learned
how a person can transmutate themselves
into the expansive essence of the universe. 

For someone who touched so many lives
you’ve filled in the shades of our hearts with
your ghost. You’re there behind every cloud
with your sunglasses on, flown into the Sun

DEAD FRIEND BOOKMARK

for Andrew Thomas Phillips


Artificial lucidity stares back
from the future accomplished. 

Having engineered a hole 
in xeroxed black and white
we peer through just like a window 
pressed between the leaves of a book.

A marker used to keep track 
of our progress and saved 
to escape through once 
the story is done.  

The tome put away on a shelf in a room 
of the basement of a house on the moon.

(A crease in the paper across the bridge 
of the nose underlines the left eye out in 
the dark half of a hypnotic magician's
divided face folded back into the heart) 

You are sorely missed, and the feeling 
we will never meet again intensifies 
because we achieved our past 
set in concrete, and memory 
remains the only portal to  
the future we'll ever know.



SL/C 9/10/15--Five days ago,
you would've been forty-five.
I've found you after all these years.