I tried to post this and nothing happened.

AT THE CEDAR TAVERN, FEBRUARY 1997

After the Saturday winter readings
we'd cross West 3rd Street through the Square
and quick-march to the Cedar Tavern,
then drink some more, eat the tolerable food,
and usually four conversations
at once produced laughter
even if no one knew quite why.

That winter of 1997 my marriage was in ruins,
but I still dwelt in that airless Between
where my sole action was waiting for
a tenant to abandon an apartment
into which I'd move; so I crept
below (I hoped) the radar
through the end-days in the house
that was now a house of strangers.
Marital ghosts roamed the rooms and halls,
fangs dripping like the Queen Alien,
while we pretended we were civilized
that hatred was too far buried for us to touch.

The proof? my wife still cooked for herself and our son,
but since I'd paid for the food, even then for me,
and I wondered Why back then and still I wonder Why,
for dinnertime was a silent torment I could face
only if I got plastered first. So
I tried not to go to whatever I called home,
performed elaborate psychological contortions
to keep myself out as late as possible, and laughed
or tried that I'd call the place Home at all
--my local habitation with a name that was lost.

There were ghosts in the Cedar too, adrift
on Saturday nights, but they were not my ghosts,
nothing to take to heart or care about,
because in those moments the dream of beauty
stank like shit, and poetry had died in me.
It clanged around in the steel ventricles
of a Tin Man clone: something detached, heartless,
anchored only to the fear that it
might never reattach, that words were dead,
and I'd be left only to read the crap I'd written years before.
Nobody would know or really care.
deception did not end at home,
it was everywhere and I wrapped myself in it.

I did not know the Cedar Tavern's history.
Nobody told me that this was the House of Fame,
the artist's paradise between the used bookstores
and dry cleaners on University Place,
a home for the blessed spirits even if they
were only the blessed-in-training, in other words
just a pack of chain-smoking drunks
swinging like bipolar pendulums in a clock shop--
manic-sad, sad-manic, graced at least
with communal misery.

Ghosts of the blessed spirits, benign
and without anything like evil intent,
and I would come to love them.

Frank O'Hara bought me a drink but
did not sit on my lap.

Rothko sat in clear stolid pain
but did not open his veins,

LeRoi Jones was not glaring
while awaiting a name change.

Dylan came through and Dylan was gone,
the Joker and the Thief together.

Contrary to mystical beliefs,
I did not absorb some secret charm from
the seats and benches, only
was what I came in with: sadness
that the subway ran uptown
to the Port Authority bus station,
and that sooner I would have to go
and later, too, I would have to go,
even beyond the darkness of the inner cold,
beyond even where those cold nights drove me.

I would never see the Cedar again.
The last I heard it's gone, out of business,
presumably taking its ghosts along for the ride.
The ghosts in any case were displaced by mine:
not famous or gifted, but weighted
with a tragic raging presence
that drove even the gifted from the room.

KTW/1-25-09