For a Friend Who Passed Along the Way...

...his name was David Wojnarowicz and I knew him back in New York during the 1970's. I remember him as this gangly quiet guy (this was before nurds)...with a dark edgy insight and a way with sketching the absurd and the dangerous. At that time Art had to have a sense of Danger for me to turn my head. David was living in an apartment in downtown Brooklyn on Court Street. The railroad flat was in the name of Dennis Deforge...a gifted fellow poet from Ohio. David was living there with his boyfriend of the time...Michael Morais. Michael was a friend of mine from my poetry excursions.  Michael is a whole other story, but it is David I am remembering. I recognized David's somewhat bent intelligence and I felt a kindred longing in both of our hearts for the Truth...I feel now that this longing was cloaked in his flirtations with the grit and grime of the gruesome gangway streets of not so pretty New York City. Some would say that David had his hand on the pulse of that urban corpse and he was dragging it through a spent rainbow of grays and blacks. My particular vision and yearning for something a bit more ultimate and glorious, weathered my enthusiam for this fading and temporary street life and it was time for me to split.  Through the grace of Existence I washed ashore at the feet of Bhagwan, my teacher in India. The last time I saw David was after I returned from the East in 1980, I believe. I was walking down 7th Ave in my orange sannyasin clothes...Long hair and beard...I noticed David loping toward me in his way. I happened to have a book of Bhagwan's (The Book of the Secrets). I never  tried to bring people to meet my Teacher...that was not my thing... My yearning had led me to India and I wanted to share that with David and not lay a "ya gotta find god" trip on him like a Hari Krishna, so I gave him the book. I told him it was his to read or throw away...we parted ways at that point...David continued on his path...over the years , I would hear things about his rise in the New York Art Scene...by that time I was working as a gardener in Marin County...reconnecting with the Earth...A friend gave me one of David's books to read one year...I probably read two pages and put it aside. I could not go there...I felt his longing had been replaced by anger...Anger at his situation...David had AIDS...what a drag for him and yet I can relate to his anger with the Government and Society...in his situation, Silence did equal Death...however, there was a part of me that knew a young man many years ago who could have transformed that anger...maybe he did...but the public David did not...I wish that his soul has met renewal and that his longing is causing sparks somewhere deep in a new heartland beyond the darkness and the grit and that his inner eye has reconnected with the Big Picture and that he brought his sketch pad and journal...and now that being can tell us all anew...refreshed in the Longing.  Richard and I wish his soul the rest it longed for....

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