Requiem: Habb
(Sammy, this is for the Habbster)
Only the retelling of an old love story can requite
the tears around the 2(pi)r orb of each eyeball
and send lank grievers down my heart lung
in a fierce swarm of a thickening squeeze
there to cleave my chest to the chest of that Dark Soul
which comes for only the children of man
--and has snuck thru all our vigils
for my one true son.
In traditory rite,
this passing leaves a brilliated breath,
a wind of time that balkanates me
again and again from behind,
or shadows me with its burning light
when I visit the neuronal pixels
where I store my first touch of the bones
in his eight year old shoulder;
only and then to fog-follow me
into lethe-wet hollows
where I stand stolidly among the moving greys
staring in hind sight at two writers
typing verse on Trash-80’s
while crying over the same woman.
It was during the first gloom after the pushing of his caddy
into the Good Night
that I flickered through the love scenes
of all our cheek to cheek hugs,
dibbed up two thirds of our scientific night gaggle,
muttering to the shakened space in my room
one of our favorite echo quacks,
‘Did we really just solve dark matter?’
--and then I write his poem, thanking him for thanking enough.
To say that we loved
is more than a song from Mr. Holland’s Opus,
and deeper sharing even
than a newsletter about a Dead Poet's Society.
To keep this hovering love inside gives no pain,
but the retelling of my story of years with this son
only squoozes the tears out of my sanguine senses
and flows them solvently over the fool of my soul
tolling and squalling like an angry battered sob.
For one of my best loved soul-friends, Habb Nelson; we spent 30 years of writing together from the time his mother introduced him to me at 8 years old until we all died on his last day. Thanking the Habbster for 30 brilliated years of real knowing -- Sam Dumas