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Advice: A Book of Poems

Chapter 10: TO A FRIEND
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About This Book

A series of short lyric pieces speaks directly to plants, animals, objects, streets and people, offering counsel, observation and ironic tenderness through apostrophic address. Urban and industrial vignettes sit beside pastoral and fable-like poems, with occasional dialogues and parable structures that alternate between sardonic humor and elegiac calm. Recurrent contrasts between motion and stillness highlight scenes of labor, performance and fleeting beauty, while a personal, conversational tone links meditative portraits and sharp urban sketches to broader reflections on perception, loss and small, uncanny moments.

TO A FRIEND

Your head is steel cut into drooping lines
That make a mask satirically meek:
Your face is like a tired devil weak
From drinking many vague and unsought wines.
The sullen skepticism of your eyes
For ever trying to transcend itself,
Is often entered by a wistful elf
Who sits naïvely unperturbed and wise.
And this same remnant, with its youthful wiles
Held curiously apart from blasphemies,
Twirls starlight shivers out upon your sneers
And changes them to little, startled smiles.
And all your insolence drops to its knees
Before the half-won grandeur of past years.