An Anniversary

If you live your life to be judged only by the things you leave behind,
leaved behind something worth judging.
It's in your hands.
Our speck of light in the span of history is
identical,
quivering symmetrical to every pulsing beam
that reached a broken conclusion.
On the surface,
the historian is the same as the meth addict -
the country music idol jangling the same three chords over
and through the cracks in his crooning voice has no more
impact than the sacrificed boy
lost in the mud in deep
old Europe -
It's the details,
the simple, tiny irrelevant bits that mesh together to form
the winding down gleaming clockwork of our
haste,
the scraps of our lives that stay after consciousness drifts and
tired eyes sag.
These are what defines us.
What defines me, to date,
what I'd leave -
three grudges, two of them justified.
Six guitar strings stretching to hum notes and quiver the dust away -
and my poems.
My deranged dancing of ink on paper
carved grooves of my thoughts blazing inside notebooks,
winking from the whitewash of a computer screen
My poems, pulsing with the rhythm of my heartbeat and the
flashing race of pen flying through to touch
and bring a smile
slip in and lay itself on a heart,
echo there amidst the love and hate
reverberating with joy and barely
repressed anger,
filling the depths of heartbreak,
whistling the soft breeze of a chuckle.
Here is where you'll find what I choose to leave behind -
words given life with love and having
all of the power of meaning behind them
etched somewhere inside
you.