To a Twelve-year-old Poet

"She wakes in still, wee hours in an ancient house that groans in restless sleep Just outside her window she hears the low sound of a breeze wrestling with the boughs of trees and nuzzling the surface..."

"I watched her dance on Beale Street, her long hair flipping in the breeze, slender limbs in constant motion as if worked by puppet strings in the hands of laughing gods I had seen her, just that day,..."

"Twenty-Second Streetgleams outside the windowcaffeinated musiccrushes the earthe young and beautifulchatter and relaxthe scene is all the way liveI am all the way aliveDupont Circle's ghostsdon't foll..."

"I see a young woman in a garden with sturdy, patient hands that nurture fragile growing things I see her eyes watching a chrysalis about to burst with life, then, the unfolding dewy wings of a delica..."

"She is a festival for my mind and eyes; I drink each drop of her satisfied, but wanting more I struggle to keep up with the quickness of her and the quickness of my pulse around her; she doesn't know..."

"She was my butterscotch flavored dream until she dreamt of me Then, I was her target for a river of abuse and I took it just so I could be close to her And now I see her, randomly on a subway train ..."