My fundamental and elemental ones

My fundamental and elemental ones

Present and gone now forever

This Gordon and this Dan
This Scott and this Gigi
This Sandy
This Milton and Moe
This Manolo
Roque and Carlos
This Andy
This Ben, this Phuc
This Paul, Joel and Grace
This Jim and this Gladys
This Irving and Sylvia

This Ruth

This Fran

These rudiments, quintessences

They went and took
Early retirement

Se los llevó La Calaca

They bought

La Flaca's
Permanent vacation package

They had too little and enough

They dirtied their hands with the stuff

Of the world

Present and gone now forever

They barricaded themselves behind their foreheads
Opened their hearts

Offered their jugulars to the wolf

Present and gone now forever

They and their ferocious dreams of betterment

Present and gone now forever

They were the golden ones

Who lived forward and understood backward

Who stood up

Stepped right up

Each a material fact of immaterial energy
Particle and wave
In the improbable world

Present and gone now forever

Oh how they squeaked and they howled

They grunted

They sang their beating hearts out

Couldn’t stop laughing or crying

Thin-skinned
Perforated and flayed
By the world

Each of them

These vessels of oh and ooo

Of ugh and duh and huh

Each had the honor of whispering
In the pomegranate orchard of midnight
Each bathed in the waterfall of things
Each made noise and had secrets

Each made music and trouble

Present and gone now forever

Each with birth and expiration dates

Off-label uses

Dying to live

Hanging on for dear life

They burned their fingers on the sun

Charred minute hands signaling through the smoke

My beautiful and rowdy friends

They lost and found their keys

And then they threw themselves away

They who were my explanation of life

These newborns

These clowns and rulers

These hummingbirds

They slipped out of the house

Before dawn
While we were sleeping

They drove alone to their appointments with pain

Enough of the respirator and the feeding tube of the world!

They broke with the caste system

Refused hush money

Ran away to join the circus of their own lives

Built a house of dignity out of water and breath

Bought La Flaca’s permanent vacation package

Laughing at the law of gravity

Present and gone now forever

They were bad just enough

Their goodness was good and good enough

Their names

Cleared now by these words

Of all wrongdoing

Gone now and present forever

                                                            -- New York, December 3, 2010