For Cornel Sampson

Strange how friendship breaks like strings into new Theories about the bonds of life. I have kept news Of nothing on the missing pages of history: and few The the frolic ever reclaimed, but I do not lose The hours spent in books when you were in school I was not. We read the same ideal of other men And thought them our own, we who never broke a rule by choice, unexposed those days, circle now the den Where ambition roars, and taste the blood of fear We cannot let the dreamers see in us. Is it not now Then that we should turn again and face the glare Like a frantic manchild racing to the end? O how You inspired me then with feet pounding into earth Your body singing with the pain that made the laurel Of mirth.