For My Sins

For my sins since I have come to this town I have been a fool and continue to be so, eschewing all masks and roles but for that, offering genuinely, and without scruples, the most intense compulsions toward wholeness, even truth. Rage, envy, regret have been my burden.
From soulless nightclubs, allnight bakeries, reflected electric light I have been able to draw a kind of sustenance, noting that the poet must be indestructible, even if he has to creep like an insect across a dirty floor, the city, any city, is his Revelation, his Koran and Torah,  his Old and New Testaments seen in inscrutable flashes, on the fresh-lipped faces of friends, behind their human eyes and on their mortal noses, behind windows, too, where liquid light wanly flickers and goes out.

Little shards of redemption, always ungraspable. Always fleeting, transitory, illusory. Always ephemeral, the gifts of music and wine, vacant-eyed girls under sodium light, dropping forth from their mouths scripted sounds of assent or delight, weariness or boredom.