How many?
How many dreams have died?
How many hopes have withered?
How many loves have faded?

How many futures have been shortened?
How many voices have been silenced?
How many friends have been lost?

How many shall have left us wanting?
How many shall have left us needing?
How many shall have left us empty?

Too many.

Another soul gone elsewhere
life taken by their own hand
perhaps a kindness they showed
themselves at last to depart these
erstwhile longing shores.

I won't do his memory disservice
by attempting any sweeping ode
nor pretend that I knew him better
than some few others in my life.

But I will pray for him, though
prayer is not something I often do
nor believe in as a certain substitute
for actual action in the direction of suffering.

Had I known how deep the extant
of said suffering I would have done
more though that is indeed the paradox
that we as humans share: namely, we don't
know anything, really, about the people
we see every single day, unless we ask.

Never again will I not ask how someone is,
never will I turn a blind eye to that shuffling
gait or those hunched shoulders nor will
I ever forget that my own pain never has
been and never will be an excuse to not
be a reasonable human being.

Good-bye and Godspeed Andrew.
Put in a good word for me please
to whoever it is that runs wherever it
is that you have gone. And please know
that it wasn't indifference that kept
me from asking after you, merely ignorance.

Some few things you should know about me
if ever I manage to capture your love.

To me, there is no such thing as casual ***
nor casual relationships, nor casual love.

It may not seem like that on the surface,
I may be able to act the part of what society
has told you to expect of a man...boy...thing.

But in truth I sit awake writing about everything
that touches me so deeply that it hurts.

Things that make me happy come with a price
called guilt, and that guilt drives me to abandon.

Stupid reasons and stupid logic born from
things done and almost done that I watched
so detached from myself that I couldn't believe it was real.

If you love me, don't ever tell me
don't do that to yourself.

Deep-fried success!
Dinky potatoes
and little Schwarzenegger
on a hornswoggled bun,
oh yes--
How they soothe my lubes,
breathe my bubbles,
and skip *** straight to breakfast.

I have waltzed
with sunset ease
into your broken dressers.

I have juggled
like schoolyard doctrines
with guts forgotten.

For every shepherd, there is a butcher.
For every artist, there is a garbageman.

I drove to Judah's Funhouse Orchard
to pick my own apples
and build my own lavender dishes,
but I put my new friends in a -famous- basket.

Oh, how it overtook me with its windswept stories!
It told me of a fat, shiny snake,
but we were drunk,
and the only person at the party whom I cared about gave me a slinky smile
and told me to leave.

So I left with a hurricane in all of my pockets,
and I played darts with the basket's forgotten, fairy-dusted nephew.
Illuminated by a single lightbulb in a concrete cavern beneath my mother's kitchen,
I learned to give up my apples
and forget my lavender dishes,
because my crudely-woven drunken comrade
is now a shining sober picture
of my sordid, henpecked past.