Kevin is a friend of mine; he's also a classical saxophonist and the conference director for the International Arts Movement, at which several ConversantLife.com bloggers were recently in attendance, including Mako and Judy Fujimura, Craig Detweiler, and me.  He publishes his delightfully playful and thoughtful poetry at versery.kevingosa.com. 

Here are two of my favorites. 

would it be better

if i took a rational
only-fools-think-people-rise-from-the-dead
position

if there had been real witnesses of the
qualified-to-comment-on-the-deadness-and-aliveness
variety

if an authority of the
certified-to-fill-out-papers-confirming-death
type
had verified—

like for my friend Jarod who
hangs his death certificate
(given to him by the paramedic as a souvenir
after he rose from the dead)
above his desk
he was absent body a few long minutes
cheating death

to be gone three days
then at supper sunday evening
would mean someone had beaten death and
wrestled from it the keys to (dare i)
eternal life

that is a hope far too great for the
rational only-fools-think-people-rise-from-the-dead mind

she, the new yorker, a homeless man, and me

i wish i would read The New Yorker
in a subway car and appear as smart and
savvy as she next to me from whom
i hide these words as i write
(ever-so-greatly tipping my notebook
leftward making the ink in my pen defy
gravity to get onto the page)
about her and her reading habits and savviness
while a homeless man declaims his verse
in the land of the blind with all the panache of a
homeless man shouting poems on a
subway car and i wonder if my verse will
one day be read by the smart and
savvy or heard by another young stealth poet
as i beg