The Story Garden 5.0
Poetry
Ten Years After, I Read the Self-Indulgent Poem I Wrote When You Died
Ten years ago, after your untimely demise
(but when is ever timely, really?)
I wrote you perhaps three even four vomitous
pages heralding your ascent into the holy chain
of suicide poets, like Jim Morrison, like Rimbaud
skulking off to Africa to barter the savage Negro,
taking your slow and dignified nod at immortality,
and now almost ten years later I read a poem
in which Thomas Lux has elegized his friend
in the way I wish you had deserved to be.
I remember your imitation of Hulk Hogan, how you
might jump from a loud asshat voice into
your low dignified hands-in-pockets POETRY-DUDE
voice, like that lone coffeehouse night when you
stumbled in drunk, demanded an audience for your
sad one-note poem(albino catfish, floppin'
in the bottom of de boat)that I thought
so fucking hilarious. With that guy who I can't
remember playing bluesy little trills on his
acoustic (he taught me to play "Driver Eight")
to accompany you and maybe that's right, maybe
the best way to put you to rest is to say what
a funny goddamned guy you were, and that the Kerouac
schoolboy-pretension way to describe your stuff
was jazz-etry not a poem not a song not fish nor fowl,
a heavenly combination academics might study in the later
years you never had, how they would tie you to Thomas
and link you to Hopkins and put you in your proper place.
I'd like to remember you now the way I think you
should have gone, with that car careering
around and the vodka and the fucking Halcion
you swore you needed bubbling your brain, and
then during that slow uncertain tailspin which ended
with your ratty black hair pasted against the window
in a foam of brains and blood (I never knew you could
drive),and your heart filled with love (yeah right)
for the people you left behind, your poems as always
bent into cornucopias in your asspocket, declaring
as you realized in those few seconds the unlikelihood
that this was just another bad trip, yes, I forgive
myself for succumbing to and dying from cliche.
I hope then as your brains left your body from
the impact that a halo formed around your dearly-
departed soul and that all you needed from life
was given to you as your soul ashed into that
burst of whitish light that all those who've
come back swear they've seen. Like you
told me the first day we met shooting straight pool
in the Union, as you calmly stroked the cue ball
into the corner pocket, unlit home-roll dangling
jauntily from your bottom lip. I was born in Scotland,
and in my country, motherfucker,
they call that being snookered.
--Richard Marshall
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