Last Surfacings

The bartender is an alchemist.
I come in
to the darkness,
away from the prying eye
of the sun
with time spent currency
his art will render
into tiny glasses
of gold forgetfulness.
Sitting still and dull,
rusting in the stale dark,
the smoke-eater drone of
the stooped regulars
beached on the bar
gets blanketed by
sheets of ringing.
It took all this time
and all my songs
to shutter these ears
from the whisper of my love.
The oak casket burn
of this next pour
is morphine sure
to soothe a
raw throat rage
that came to stay
and stole
the birdsong words
of the only-every.
It took all those
hours of hushed passion
and whispered futility
to hide this voice
in the husk of the sandstorm.
When the dusk has been
shut down,
the bar fills with
the wandering eyes and lusting
voices of the drifting young.
I roll the cracked sidewalks
under my feet
back to my cell.
In the whiskey dumb evening
I squint at the new world
going to sleep.
It took forty one years
and unumbered thousands
of useless dreams
to see
that I was born blind,
confined and groping,
cut off from beauty,
chained to dead magic,
wandering away from love.