by William Teets
On slow boring days, you’d randomly yell,
Let’s go drown a fisherman, catch a minotaur by its horns
Your words promised a peek into the bearded lady’s tent,
exposed who hid behind that mysterious fabled curtain
I always followed along
Expected to find the goose and her laid golden eggs,
stumble up a beanstalk while Jack fell from the sky
And though we never really tilted at windmills
or spat into a saloon spittoon with Wild Bill Hickock,
no one can tell me we didn’t
But life pushed our realities apart, years burnt by
I feared something wicked
would soon come your way
Still, I refused to believe the early morning call from your mother
saying they found you floating in the greenish water
beneath the Chelsea piers
Your body battered and bruised from life’s jagged rebar and concrete,
bloated like Bluto, an old black-and-white cartoon
At the city morgue, your mother emptied your property bag
onto a stainless-steel gurney
We stood silent and stared
at your methadone clinic card,
a pewter Statue of Liberty keychain
without any keys
© 2024 William Teets All rights reserved.
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