January 2021
Bio Note: I teach workplace rights to numerous day labor centers throughout New York City,
and have taught my short stories at high schools in New York and New Jersey for the Hudson Review
Writers In The Schools. As a lawyer, I represent injured workers seeking workers' compensation benefits.
My first novel, The Money, will be published by Black Rose Writing on February 25th.
Beautiful Ruin
Chet Baker, “Let’s Get Lost” (Novus/RCA 1992) Not in the dazzle of the yet-to-be, When your voice rang with heroic self-invention, Or quivered, not knowing The wonders beyond your next refrain, But later, coarsened by cigarettes and smack, By uppers, booze, and bennies, By lovers like fame who gave too much, Or left no notes when you woke to those empty beds— Later when your voice ached with the road, When you reached for a forgotten lyric And were nothing but the rhythm Of some vestigial prompting From the inner ear— Only then did you, Like a battered thrush, Sing your marrow’s song Warding off extinction at dusk.
Originally published in Pembroke Magazine, #50.
©2021 David Shawn Klein
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the
author (email address above) to tell her or him. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual.
It is very important. -JL