For me we it
comes realizing later
that Chris Cornell is gone
same as Dad but different still
we have our Garden
of Sound with weeds sprouting against
the grim Cutter hoping
for a missed experienced

Maybe the refugee's trauma
have dried all the tears on
lonely crowded airfields
of a long ago Vietnam seeding
salt from a Grandmother, mother,
father, aunts and uncles,
paladins in our child eye dry
because of the stampeding Thestrals
we shouldn't see

And now almost 50 we know
better the slings and arrowheads
of fortune the calcifying currency
souls make by roughing the round edges
of damning tears scattered like petals
over littered cigarettes killing
us softly because they've metastasized
from intellectualized Lung ****
to a flowering carcinoma