A Dream of Joe

May 25
Mourn all those who momentarily allowed you
to exceed your mercenary station,
those friends

Below the flora and fauna
of my diffuse, attenuated version of survival
is a bedrock of things I’ll only admit in dreams
or when so drunk that the day opens with reflexive shame

Like how I waited all night in a dreary bar
just to embrace my dead friend once more
and woke with wet eyes,
when everything is just fine,
and I had a hundred resumes to send

Dear dead friend, circumstance twinned us,
and now we fade from each other in reverberations of approval
that grow warmer and less specific by the season

Lately, Joe finds me through local rumors,
smudged postcards, and boxes full of unsellable t-shirts
We meet in wooded patches between failed Worcester restaurants
and he says he’s not dead, says he had to go away
for a while, but he’s back now, but don’t tell anyone

And I become outraged
I tell him I thought he was dead, to which he shrugs
I tell him we all thought he was dead, to which he shrugs
I tell him it really fucked me up when I thought he was dead,
to which he shrugs

The shrug my dead friend gives my grief
may be the beginning of wisdom,
a living friend tells me