New Jack is Dead

[TranquillityBase]

My best friend for 40 years was a conspiracist.  I met him at age 22.  We couldn't have been more different.  He was probably an asshole to most people.  He started me out on JFK's assassination and Ouspensky and Gurdieff and it went on from there.  Drumpf destroyed our friendship and then he killed himself.

This is a poem I wrote about the friend I mentioned:

We were compadres, competitors,
occasionally enemies. 
We watched each others’ romances unfold,
and fold and sometimes cross.

You came along in ’78,
I know because it was an April day 
when you taught me how to get stoned at work,
leading me to a secluded goldfish pond 
only a few yards from the  University’s Tower
and pulling out a joint,
and you hadn’t heard that Sandy Denny was dead.

We went to a play
called Your Mother Wears Combat Boots.
You showed up in an ill-fitting business suit, 
pointed to your shiny leather shoes,
and said, “Dead man’s shoes”, laughing hysterically.

You were a Bard of conspiracies,
from JFK to Bilderburg.
You owned Ben Thompson’s roulette wheel,
and lived with a former cheeleader you called “strictly TV”
who read you to sleep at night.
You owned land in Nova Scotia,
and you had an arch-enemy named Scottie.
You read Gurdjieff, Ouspensky and sent Colin Wilson
Your murderer’s name theory, and got a reply.

You got your face painted as a lizard skin
for the Fall Carnival at Armadillo World Headquarters.

In 1978, you wanted to live to be as old as possible,
and you told about an old man at a junkyard 
who lived in a tin shed 
full of junkyard porn magazines.  
and then you were silent.

I’m still working on that koan, Philip.

I’ve lived with your suicide for five years now, 
felt you looking in, but that still leaves me alone
here on Tranquillity Base.