I
What I meant to notice was
your fine hands drumming
on the wheel, the air like grapes
through Danbury to New Haven.
But we were singing, not
the famous song your uncle wrote,
but "Lay Lady Lay" and something
from Fairport Convention.
Like every other Friday at 3 p.m.
you had taken your Compazine
and we were nearly to the hospital
with its halo of elms

II
Long and thin
as a clock hand
ticking twelve
your body lay on our bed.
I place my fingers on your chest,
on the hollow batons
of your ribs.

III
We live north of our fate.
Snow cakes on the porch steps
dense as the air upstairs when I bake
lead bricks and call them bread.  Generous,
you eat thin slices with butter and banana.
It is so white in the bedroom,
snowlight cast up from the road.
Your dark brillo hair is like
live wires searching for a signal.
We throw your economics
books to the floor.  On the cold sheet
we lay together.  The melting snow
is my evidence.  Once, you and I,
in a sweat of sexlove, here.
I close my mouth now.
I have confessed everything
to you.

IV
Your mother never played
the grand piano in the living room.
But you played
Rock and Roll radio
and when I called you
on a bet with my friend
Mary Ellen, you knew
Fontella Bass sang "Rescue Me"
in 1965 and how long
she was in the Top 10
and who was #1 before
and after her.  Facts like that,
I could count on.  Facts like
when you died  
you were 29 years old.
"The Harder They Come"
by Jimmy Cliff was at the top
of the charts, followed
by Neil Young "Heart of Gold."
I don't know
what these invisible facts mean.
They comfort me.

V
We tell no one of your prognosis.  Cancer
was contagious then.  We don't
even say the word.  Not to your best friend
Elliot or your mother or my parents.  
While you lie in that floating bed
visiting with ghosts,
I sneak out,
have burning ***
with a Viet Nam vet
who knows about death,
and bodies.

VI
I am on a crowded sidewalk.
I think I am dreaming.
It is Sixth Avenue and like two
vast rivers of fish,
people press urgently
north and south.
After seven years, I see your dark
head above the others.  You are
looking down, but steadily move
toward me.  I am helpless
with hope.  You come close.  
If I could lift my hand, I would
open my palm on the long
plane of your chest.  
Very slow, you raise your head.  
You look into my eyes.  
Your eyes are brown,
as always.  
Like rain you speak to me.  
"I will meet you,"
you say, "in the Andes."
Then you disappear.

I’m avoiding a void, Freud warned me of
by worming my way in to the apple of my eye
I know it sounds paranoid as above so below
ground zero dark thirty where I heard the well runs dry.
Hell, I wonder why I try to quench my thirst for knowledge
from any ***** puddle when I’m at a cow college
‘cuz nowadays I rather cuddle up with a good book
than be-fuddled by how to transgress, ring a bell hooks?
Well looks deceive and I can guess
by the wings you have yet to receive
we have come to the some of nothing
from something I thought we were far beyond
but maybe I was wrong at the end of it all.
You said it wasn’t my fault but then again,
Freire taught me how to lock
away my thoughts in a vault.

I’m hemmed in with Hemingway in the corner of the café.
We spend half the day laughing at our neighbors savoring
their lattes but condemning how they stray away from nature
‘cuz labor’s not their taste.
He says, “What a waste of time.
Do you see a better paradigm?”
I agree because I was scared at the time
to embarrass myself in front of an idol of mine.
I know it’s futile to rival a dead mind
but when they’re better than the headlines
I don’t mind if I never shine brighter than a dying light
‘cuz it only really matters in the end if I’m trying right?
but what am I trying for when I lost a friend to love and war?
Cut the ties, I’m alive.
Who was I dying for?
Who was I fighting for?
Who was I writing for?

Shelby tells me where the sidewalk ends
and well, he’s been a better friend than you’ve ever been;
ever since you left me and met he who shall not be named
nor blamed for this game you played against us.
Again trust was just a part of it all.
I was miserable like Margaret Hall.
Withdrawals always reinforce walls of remorse
and of course, I’m the source of all your problems
but who took the time to resolve them?
You weren’t forced to endorse any course of action
except follow the laws of attraction.
Perhaps gravity magnifies abreaction
or the severity of abstraction.
Yet Apollo would swallow
all his pride and passion
hollow out his home
and throw a match in.

© Matthew Harlovic