.......The blues were cold that day, the sun was dead
I saw you in a parking lot, buying junk from just another junky
All that stuff and junk between us, baby, does it ever
Really matter, so many stairways and balconies
And moonsets, moonshines,
I think I found you in the gutters
But, hey, maybe it was you who found me
Laying sprawled out with my back to the door
At the KETTLE AND FISH,
McDonald’s around the corner
Feeling like just another bruised railroad track
Tire tracks and junk tracks and taxi cabs,
And Johnny Cash on the radio, yes, that cover of Personal Jesus
Playing all the way down to Washington Square
Where the jokers & thieves play(ed) in salvation blues;
Wasn’t that you up there with the misplaced Hymn
And that guy in the splattered tatterdemalion green,
How we were registered in the ministered movements of
The soft divide, bursting through the Gothic residue
REM on the radio, and we had no idea how far we were
Losing our religions it just didn’t matter
From the beginning of everything, and redemption was
Just another ghetto punk kid right around the corner
Burnt out on white shade and the shadow of darkness
This dispassionate recognition,
Like bourbon and infinity out of focus, if I didn’t know
Any better, I would’ve known it was you, baby
But maybe it was just me all along
Singing just another lonely heartbreak song
Encumbered in the reconfiguration of the moon’s resolve
Like sunset desperately everlasting
Like Tom Waits Blood in the rearview mirror
Artificial insects dreaming of hummingbirds, clearer
Dreaming their wings over the Harlem River, baby
I know I saw you there, as desperate as the next curve
Another clown waiting to be found
I found you there, baby, bound you and warmed you
And warned you of who I could be; but you:
“Johnny, I just don’t care,”
And that was just good enough for me
Reading Truman Capote at Tiffany's
You, thinking of Audrey and a bag of bagels;
An ageless rhythm in an old orange opera
You followed me down to that Leonard Cohen Hotel
The one where Sid shot Nancy and you said it was "all for love"
The Chelsea Hotel, where Kerouac, Ginsberg, Bob & Dylan Thomas
Scribbled their words on the cracked & rotting walls...

...you had me wear a blue raincoat even though
It was 79 degrees, hot; fuck, “it’s way too hot for this coat,
Even with this grey misty rain.”
You tilted your head,shrugged your shoulders
Said I looked like "James Dean", so I kept the coat on, for you
And all those streets like adult eyes passed us by
We walked into the Apple Bon Bon Bar and ordered two
Glasses of red, the bartender smiled and gave us that look;
You just laughed, so I laughed, the crowd melted away
(Moby was playing on the house speakers...
I think it was The Sky Is Broken.
“I know the way you feel/ like the rains outside/ speak to me...”
But I was hearing Find My Baby over and over and over...
Yea, we were two fucked up lost souls drifting about the
The East Village New York City and SoHo atmosphere
Didn’t matter if it was Liza, or Frank or Bono or Madonna
We were elaborate in the Chardonnay of our company
With dazed candor; the sky iridescent neon green, we were
The new toys, the new boys drinking where Dylan used to sing
Hearing Mr. Tambourine Man in the alleyway shadows
Like footsteps, like ghosts, like jokers;
We were falling down in apartment loft building stairways
Bernardo, you were my guy that weekend
As tight as gravity and booze, as gracious and blues
Feeling the midnight like mosquitoes biting our necks
Those damn insectile lizard vampires, and how we laughed
I don’t think I had ever been so drunk in my life
As that night with you - how they all thought we were lovers
And we were only just become friends; but sometimes I wonder
How it could’ve ended, if we took each other in the arms
Stared hard into our eyes; oh, Bernardo, I’ll never forget you
You were the closest I ever came to having a male lover;
Life it turns, it flows, it turns, it grows old
Sometimes I wished I kissed you,
Even if just to see what it would’ve been like
I felt you falling for me, and I am fashionable sorry
That I never gave us a chance - does it really matter that
We were two guys in the Big City having the time of
Our life (our lives),
 
Would it have mattered if we shared that same
Hotel room on Waverly Place, when I stayed
In the rented sublet flat on Bleeker Street instead?
You never forced your
Michael Stipe smile upon my face, and for that I think I love you
“Cause you could’ve had me, but you knew I wasn’t that way.
And I recall your murmured voice speaking those Stipe lyrics
Of Talk About the Passion...

"Empty prayer, empty mouths, combien reaction
Empty prayer, empty mouths, talk about the passion..."

And then your voice changed mothlike, mournful & beautiful
As you began to sing those words...

"Not everyone can carry the weight of the world,
Not everyone can carry the weight of the world...

Gripped as the winter like the old folks like to say
Tripped up in September best friends we grew that day;
You were my hour, my memory, my canyon
That absolute weekend; two days before
The Twin Towers were torn down.
(Our ghosts still walk in the shadows on Thames Street
Near Trinity Church,
Down around and in Ground Zero)...

We took different trains on different days
Not to Rockville, but back to Springfield
And I knew you stayed a day or two longer;
God how my whole soul felt numb, heavy
And full of holes,
My bones like a dead dawn, like a broken old machine;
I watched from the red rocks of Mt. Tom over Easthampton
Praying you were not at that bookstore near
The World Trade Site off Park Row,
And then I saw you later that week at Luva
Drinking a fine wine and smoking your filterless Camel cigarettes
That Turkish blend in the air mixing with my Indonesian kretek smoke;
You looked at me like life was just another joke, and I smiled
You had made it back,
Alright, Bernardo, you made back and safe
I was never so relieved
My burnt eyes in the street-sign window reflection
Llike two Blaue Blumes
Sitting in a bruised windowsill Inn
Or whatever the Hell that's suppose to mean(?)
"Right."
I guess if I was ever going to make it with another guy
You know it would’ve been you,
But our lives would never bend that way...

But life changes, lives change
The way a guy cuts his hair, or orders a new drink
Runs his fingers through his hair...
But I’ll never forget that
Heart attack
And Fifteenth Street
And you just being you
And bring me back while I leant upon your shoulder
Drunk and full of blooms.

I have molehills in my future, Leonard Cohen in my stains
Maybe someday I’ll see you again, my friend
I cannot promise I’ll ever kiss you, but I know I would hold you
As tight as Jesus Christ in chains
So don’t you even think about the devil of this poem
It might not be the kind of nature you were hoping it to be
......."Not everyone
......................Can carry
............. The weight
........ Of The
....World"

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