His poetry suffered his dimming of visionImagined himself somehow as art's new additionBut grades and waned interest betold the sad taleAnd off he was packed to small Susanville

*   *   *

Snow, though a picture, is no footfall's friendAnd though presence suggested a straight-arrow mendHe withdrew in his heart, yet behaved on the outSo determined return to his fellows, no doubt

Stoked fires burning, his loneliness ravingHis silently mutinous railings, his savingHe turned a lot inwards, and shared very littleNever seeing his chance at sobriety's riddle

Yet steady and slow paced, intelligence seepsAs an eminence grise in his ear while he sleepsThe pigs that he slopped, the trash that he burnedImparted, through chores, certain ethics returned

All efforts to get back to city of stoneAnd out of the wilderness, where all aloneHe'd found the communal life not to his likingA gilded cage, though there was swimming and biking

A wish sometimes granted in spite of our needsAnd as fondness, for drugs too, that absence did feedDesire -- for freedom, for self-divinationFor all the things bad for him, self as oblation

*   *   *

The end of yet another phaseIn somber, retrospective gazeTo cringe is natural, sensing ruinIn future of this lad, but soon