By Michael Lee Johnson

Like all thing’s life changes, its melodies fragment.

It breaks pieces apart, then they drift, then shatter.

The singers of songs love bars,

naked bodies, consistencies, and inconsistencies

that makes it burn all turn outright at night.

They like to drum repeat rhythms and sounds.

Poets like to retreat to dens

of pleasure just like these.

Sing poets sing off-key

free verse notes down by the bridge,

near the river as far as their voices

will carry them away.

It is the nature of difference,

indifference a vocabulary of us confused,

minds between insanity and genius.

The hermit asks for

a public forum in shyness,

while treading to the bar

next door for a shot of tequila

no money, no life.