Adam the Black Hat Sage,
his choice of a business card nickname,
not mine,
is handing out free cigars and bills of health
that are effortless in their compromises.

He’s an idiot,
and I hope he dies alone,
but he knows what to do
with his gambling addiction.

Good friends,
old friends,
pre-school friends,
literary friends,
knuckle sandwich friends,
Adam gets that they’re going to clear out
when he stops giving them things.

He’s an idiot. Not long for this world
of window-shoppers and painted, educated inconsistencies,
but he loves people enough to give them
the wrong kind of advice.

You watch. He’s going to die
because he’s easily swayed by a weary redhead
leaning against a park bench at four a.m.
with cigarette smoke mixing with her shampoo.

Can you tell I don’t dig the guy?
Let me have my stupid reasons.

Though there was this one time,
and I hope I’m never desperate enough
to tell him this,
he was right about something.

There really were grizzly bears
roaming the halls of our discarded high school
last year.

I miss that place like a starlet,
who split the paper atoms in my heart
with a hammer made of paperclips.

Adam was one of the wild bunch hallway all-stars.
We both were. That’s how we met. The lot of us
knocking around a building that was designed
with two middle fingers lighting up the laws of physics.

Yes,
exactly like you’d light up a cigar
when you realize your shoes are not going
to be there for you for the whole eighty-mile walk.

Those all-stars are way gone,
long gone, deeply wrong and not a song
to make them the heroes we should have been.

Except Adam. Except me.

He knows I resent that,
so he keeps his distance
when we see each other in a room
full of topless dancers and suave Atheists.

I guess I should owe him that,
but I’m stubborn,
and I remember things more clearly than he does.

I recall,
for example,
that better, happier people
were always getting us mixed up.

And I’m eccentric,
or just bitter,
about the things that hassle my dreams
when quiet adds a second coat to the insatiable walls.

07/14/2012

Posted on 07/15/2012
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