The Paperback Writer’s Swan Song Muse

I watch the saddest man in the

universe shuffle along the cold

iron-hearted streets, splitting

dirty fingernails to the cusp as

he picks at black gum and tar hoping

to free all his long abscessed dreams.

His long matted gray hair and beard painfully

dredded with none of the Rasta love freezes

to his face in the indifferent northern city’s winter.

In the mirror reflected in my eyes, I see him in

a lonely corner of the city library wrapped in shredded

rags as much dirt and dust as they are cloth. I hear

his futile taps on the old Underwood as his sad and

lonely words appear as weak life-sparks on my screen

as brutal and lost as the damaged neural-city in my head

he resides in. His eyes, long lunatic, spit the same fire as

the one in mine.