Art! Art is the terrifically wretched act of understanding.

All artists do is weep about the Eternal Oblivion

and Kill Themselves in wonderful ways. 

Last night I met a man in Detroit who took me into a bar

and whispered in my ear, “The redcoats are coming!”

Running across the Einsteinian timeline, mourning the birdsong.

The bartender in Detroit looked so beautiful to me that day,

his face was the smell of the air at dawn, traveling in my 

stepdad’s car to the airport for our 4 a.m flight.

The bartender’s eyes were murky, the puddles of water

as I run across Portland, flinging the super communist

pamphlets I promised Ginsberg I would give to the kids.

The bartender’s lips were cracked like the books where

the great minds of my generation are just now discovering the 

Ubermensch before them, going through the first phase of wretched understanding.

Bartender! I want to be a poet! Bartender! Don’t tell my

father! My father hates poets, that is why his teeth have

never been stained by the cigarettes of youthful exuberance.

Romantic visions of short-lived half-lives,

the atoms of my existence become disintegrated.

Every moment is a curse, a blessing, a painful need to outlive my death.

The bartender in Detroit understood my plight,

the existential suffering of every self-aware soul.

A corporeal God in his bartending uniform, he transcended written record.

Every stroke of genius that will prevail time is

the retelling of the bartender in Detroit, whose tragic epiphany

was that of the great imitation between art and life.