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Monk I | Painting by Pablo Shine

TODAY I AM A FREE MAN

for Pablo Shine

Today I am a free man.
Today I walk the avenue
of leafy shadows
freer than I was yesterday or
freer than I will be tomorrow.
Yesterday I was a slave to time,
to the dying willow leaves,
to the horrors of earning a dollar,
to the beauty of strange lovers,
to the corruption of language.
Tomorrow I will be haunted
by childhood,
the sorrows of old age,
the mystery of death.
But today I am a free man,
walking in cool leafy shadows.
I am free from sleeping pills
and politics,
from disease and the hellish
plagues of desire.
I have learned to twitter like
a bird,
and anyone who hears me
no doubt will be stricken
with undying jealousy.
I am a free man whose soul
has grown strings, whose whole life
has been transcribed to music
for the guitar.
Below naked branches that allow
the lofty radiance to stream through
I walk and twitter and pluck and gaze.
I walk past windows filled with
shoes and books and grapes
and I wonder why there are no wings
for sale.
I would strap them on and fly far above
the city,
filled with ecstatic love for all my
sisters and brothers spellbound in
this earthly strife.
But if I am content to simply walk
the avenue
tell me that I cannot be condemned
for this.
Tomorrow I will sleep in an uncaring
museum
and eat raw fish in a dark tavern,
weep in a bone-chilling empty church,
exercise in a cemetery of fallen stones.
Tomorrow, but not today.
Today I am a free man,
not regretting my birth,
not sniffed at by my death.
Slipping through leafy shadows,
below the unimpeachable blue of sky,
my heart is one big
silly foolish blossom.

Much more on Ronald Baatz can be fond on his web page by clicking here…

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