I have been running my legs into the ground, finding any excuse from work time at my home office desk, laundry, grocery shopping, invoicing clients, to run; and tonight was no exception. Five pm, a winter dusk, sky like angora unraveling pale blue and palm pink, there are Christmas lights on every block and I want to be there, out there, as those are switched on as the northern hemisphere darkens, I want to be running down the middle of the street along the edge of day and not notice when black replaces day, I simply want to be in it when it does, look up and see the first star and fuck the cliché and make a wish. Because I want it to work. Because at the end of the day, I’m 41 years old and still wishing on stars and still writing poems believing that if the words line up, if the right words combine, they add up to some kind of sum for which there is no formula, no linear equation, just a string of words running across a page toward someone’s eyes, to be seen, to be heard, words that fill-in the open spaces, like punctuation on the lost hours of days when we think about what we’ve lost, who we miss, why we love, and why we stay.

Several years ago I held a series of poetry workshops in San Francisco with some homeless people, a small group with a Grand Canyon width range of stories, addictions, and ages. One young fellow, about 25, a junkie, more or less on the streets about 10 years, wrote about tender butterfly wings awakening slowly, ‘…so catch me a star, the day is red, so catch me a star….’  Another, an older woman spewing forth several personalities except silent when writing, writes about being awoken by a broken sun, sailing on an ocean blanketed with purple jellyfish, …’ When the wind awakens/and we are running free/again, I’ll pour you/a drink and we’ll search for land.’  A big, scary looking, quiet guy, comes in each day, throws down his pack, holds his hand out for paper and a pen, curls himself up in a corner and writes. When it’s time to share, he stands up and reads his poem about too much nutmeg in the black bean soup…

Sometime when you’re walking down the street, and some scruffy, strung out guy asks you for a quarter, maybe just give it to him in the name of round-about busking, just give it to him for the poem in his head, the one being written without you knowing it, the one he’s running from, or running to, or wishing on, the same star we’re all banking on delivering one of these days.