Wrong for Too Long

“Poverty, my dear friend, is so great an evil, and pregnant with so much temptation, and so much misery, that I cannot but earnestly enjoin you to avoid it.”
                                      – Samuel Johnson, to James Boswell

Stepping out into the sun-
light & the wind
              to revise the architecture of these ritual implements
beer bottles, rusty nails
                              inevitable acoustic sledgehammers
& the steeple of a submerged church
              propped against the window glass
I drove all the way there
                              under an assumed name
thus did I occasion the homemade electric
              mandolin w/Arabic footnotes
while struggling to ace the
                              penniless, blah blah, woe is me, etc, chorus
              in braille…
Asked for one word that describes my poetry I said
relentless
                              I knew those mirrors needed proof
beyond the bend of the tide the
              floating mosaic drift of sea & sky
an unsafe & impractical guide
                                                like divine scripture
                              begging for more