To My Friend With The Tiger Head

Went cycling through a California dusk the other day
Catching a familiar fragrance billowing among the stiff stars
When remembrances of Europe two years ago flashed by
The midnight blue sacks of Drum in your purse,
fleeing by train, and when you taught me to hand roll cigarettes
On a beer garden bench in Berlin under discotheque lights
Must have been a couple times you tried to demonstrate
Pity I never got it down right

Sometimes Amsterdam and Berlin,
They seem like neighborhoods in my head
Back in Vondelpark when I told you
I had felt Beelzebub caricatures
accosting my senses near that shy lit lake
there was something else I felt too
something else I never told you–
I felt your soul

To think I’d only known you
for a couple of weeks back then
It hit me like a sandbar hits a hull
ripping me open at the keel
purging out stores of old cargo
made rancid by a voice still berating romance
transmitted from the states, so very far away
See…

You did more by sitting next to me silently,
All those hours which felt like squares on a quilt,
Than anyone else could have by talking
I felt your good nature, dear friend
Is what I’m trying to say to you
A soul of pianissimo sparks
Gliding, scintillating
through underground nights of gossamer thought
Intrinsic, but none the less beautiful in its motions

And I tell you this now rather than later
not because my death or yours is imminent
But because death is imminent
And well,
We’ll be left asking some day again, I’m certain
Where does the time go?
When indeed one of us may already hold the answer
To this, our very own question

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