OC For the young poet

You've seen the warnings
The roadside bodies
The genius burnt to bone
The faded graves of minstrel knaves
laughing beneath headstones

For the monkeys love their martyrs
more than the singing soul
And they'll cast your words into the dirt
for a penny's worth of gold

You'll sing, you'll dance, you'll publish strong, you'll grab a tail and waltz along, and all the while the crocodile smiles

until it yawns, and then you're gone

scattered leaves of chapbook pages
swirling in the sunset wind
forgotten twists of rhyme and reason
all your confessions of your sins

And what legacy is thus? The thousand monkeys cry
Nothing but whispers and dust, the library replies
In this empty hall of history
The Q and A becomes a Y

The Y lies within the spin
between Henry Miller and Anais Nin
Burroughs to Ginsberg, unfettered in the Yage Letters
Hemmingway and Stein, twisting Paris time,
The eternal burn of inspired minds

that casts poetry into the philosophy, heart into the rhythm
Sealing the schism between what is and can be
Igniting science to explore eternally
the riddle that is humanity

A god within an ape, an ape within a brain,
a brain within a god, impotent and insane
A heart within a soul, a soul with a skin
A skin caressed by angels breath
and tickled pink with sin

The entirety of that unreasonable Y
lies within your I
and if it drips from your singing lips
it reveals the divine within

Let the sound of your spirit singing
Lead you to your heart
And then no matter how rough the road
You'll blaze away the dark