Tonight your remembered presence in red, is a raft which is seemingly on fire on a river,which I have to cross to live a dark river, an overflowing river of pain. I am drowning and you are burning.

Somewhere wheels are turning on the tarmac, a smell of burnt things, ash at the altar before I finish my prayer. Do you know, I am yet to wash the shirt that seperated my heart from yours: skin vibrating like a gong or a drum.I cover my face with it and I smell your burning which marked me.

I am drowning and a black tide is coming in, I am coral, a mere gathering of dying cells, Go on call me beautiful, go on confess before each cell is extinguished, before I become coral. Go on touch me, but you can't touch me: your palms can't hold me but how they held me.

Make a raft for me, open your plams I ask you to open your palms so that I can change my history as I change yours. Open your plams and I will speak no lies, your fortune will burn as your palms burnt mine. Open your palms and sail me across the river But if you can't, become the river and fill me with a roaring silence in which I can drown.

2003:01:06 00:30 Atlanta (AD)

How I wish to complete the circumference of my broken circles.

They paved paradise and put up a parking lot With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swingin' hot spot Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone They paved paradise and put up a parking lot

Ooooh, bop bop bop Ooooh, bop bop bop

They took all the trees, and put em in a tree museum And they charged the people a dollar and a half to see them No, no, no Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot

Ooooh, bop bop bop Ooooh, bop bop bop

Hey farmer, farmer, put away your DDT I don't care about spots on my apples, Leave me the birds and the bees Please Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone They paved paradise and put up a parking lot Hey now, they paved paradise to put up a parking lot Why not?

Ooooh, bop bop bop Ooooh, bop bop bop

Listen, late last night, I heard the screen door slam And a big yellow taxi took my girl away Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone They paved paradise and put up a parking lot Well, don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone They paved paradise to put up a parking lot Why not? They paved paradise and put up a parking lot Hey hey hey Paved paradise and put up a parking lot

Ooooh, bop bop bop Ooooh, bop bop bop

I don't wanna give it Why you wanna give it Why you wanna giving it all away Hey, hey, hey Now you wanna give it I should wanna give it Now you wanna giving it all away

Hey, paved paradise to put up a parking lot

This song was playing last night as I fell in a death like sleep or raced away in a Big Yellow Taxi.

My hands have not touched pleasure since your hands, -- No, -- nor my lips freed laughter since 'farewell', And with the day, distance again expands Voiceless between us, as an uncoiled shell.

Yet, love endures, though starving and alone. A dove's wings clung about my heart each night With surging gentleness, and the blue stone Set in the tryst-ring has but worn more bright.

I was reading Hart Crane today at Borders even though at the end it was too painful to read the next word in each line. He is a poet I had never read and I think who should be read. Consider these lines and go onto voyages into Crane's poetry and life:

And so, admitted through black swollen gates That must arrest all distance otherwise Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments, Light wrestling there incessantly with light, Star kissing star through wave on wave onto Your body rocking! and where death, if shed; Presumes no carnage, but this single change -- Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn The silken skilled transmemberment of song; Permit me voyage, love, into your hands .