The other night after your reading
I wanted to introduce myself—say something
engaging, something that might interest you,
but what could I have said?  Then, observing you 
from a corner, it occurred to me you were taller 
than I thought, but by that time, the reception was over 
and you had gone.  It would have been a good
one-liner to give at your next reading, delivered 
stand-up style, droll, dead pan, how a reader 
said he thought you were taller than he imagined.
It would have fallen in well with your self—
deprecation that seems to amuse everyone. 
 
But this poem is about meditation, and your name,
Billy, is the doorway to those riches.  By the way, Billy 
is a diminution, a linguistic shrinkage, like Jimmy,
or Mikey.  No one takes a name like that seriously.
It’s the name of a boy; non-threatening, a bit playful,
bouncy perhaps, even smoothly androgynous.  It’s
not a man’s name, not the name of a septuagenarian.
Yet it fits with the stage persona I’ve been observing,
a slightly perplexed figure, baffled and intrigued
by human folly, including his own, and at times
a bit smug, tho’ it might be well-deserved, but that
 
could be stretching it, like that invisible elf in the conical hat 
who occupies a corner of a classroom, smirking 
at the awkwardness and oddities of our kind, 
which leads this poem to its subject, meditation—
a way around what monks call “monkey mind,” 
that state in which we arrive after our short interludes 
of mental stability.  It’s like hearing an eternal engine 
in a garage, but which garage when there are a thousand 
empty ones, and still it grinds away and after we’ve run 
from one garage to another and have become more agitated,
after years of this, we seek a way to ignore it, and we call it meditation.