The "last round" bell clanged, sending Island night owls slowly shuffling out. Drunkenly, Ernest eyed the lighthouse above tops of trees Showing the way home, stumbling back from Sloppy Joes. Cracked chips of paint cling To his hands in the humidity, from clutching too tightly At railings, mounting the porch steps where Six-toed felines and a wife wait on Whitehead Street. Clickity-clackity, composing chapters, putting genius on paper Before electroshocks and shotgun solitude can take it away Like Castro confiscated his Cuba, leaving An old man and his sea of sorrow, stretching Ninety miles to Havana Harbor.

sleep comes for me on dark wings faintly stirring this world-weary; careful traces on stones at night of a crisped autumn leaf crackle dessicated and downtrodden while in the skies above, pulsars wink out                    and the suns grow dim empty empires long vacant amplify, echo the hollowhaunt these hollow broken—these hallowed halls strains and swells the sweet-sorrowful,                    soulless, unbodied, undying