For the last time,
I will glorify this scum
(for aren't we all scums anyway):
That there is he
who furtively climbed cars with boys to get paid if the grapevine news was right;
who borrowed amounts beyond his capability to return;
who hid burrowed in sheets of pain and wailed in the middle of the night;
who held his passion in his right hand and an empty cup in his left, waiting for long overdue rain to quench a soul-thirst
because the jarring truth is that not all of us are blessed, perseverance does not always pay and it leads us in resignation to find hope in squalid back-alley paths to an end instead, how very Machiavellian;
whose photo memories lay plastered on a wall in a worldwideweb bodega somewhere;
who tried to live and gave the last dregs of his dreams to children losing hair to chemo.
Here lies he
who did this all, and all for dreams
because he dreamed hard, he knew how to dream,
(more than moneyed but talentless nitwits in ivory towers, yes he knew how to dream)
but whose dreams were too far to reach from the bed that neither his body nor the holes in his pocket would allow