Why Be A Bukowski Or An Emily? They Are All Dead Poem by RIC BASTASA

hey friend, dear poet
why be an emily dickenson or a charles bukowski
or a walt whitman or an ezra pound

look man, they are all dead
they're great, they have given themselves
extraordinary fames
commensurate to their extraordinary works
but they are all dead
and they have no more possibilities

they are all impotents
and faded and (forgive the word)

gone, gone, gone, gone.
let them be but part of our memories,
nothing but maps, guides, to the roads that we must now
take,
ghosts, famous ghosts, but ghosts just the same,
spirits, their poems are here with us
as a legacy

but we are alive, we are the possibilities
we are more than miserable with our
search for meaning
our quest to justify our insignificances
these little cravings for light
and scent and color
these little lives we have

if true to our miseries
as they were true to theirs

we can even be more
than what they had in their own time
in their own lives
have become......

sail on man, sail on, in the ocean of possibilities
in the vast space of our potentialities

we can be ourselves, truly ourselves,
that to me,
is greatness enough