2024 NaPM 09 April

[TranquillityBase]

In Memory of Jon Garth Murray, 1954-1995

In our elementary school class prophecy
I wrote that you would be a “wealthy ditch digger”
which was somehow hilarious at age 12,
you were the younger son of the most-hated woman in America
who once bought me ice cream 
at a Baskin Robbins in an outdoor mall.

After seeing The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
walking home from school
we took stances at both ends of a footbridge
I was wearing Lee Van Cleef’s cross-belly holster
you laughed at our ritual, but you always drew.

Your stepfather had a steel plate in his head,
and was a right-winger,
but it was Madalyn who called the shots.

Before high school was over,
her obsession had been awkwardly grafted onto you,
before college, we were no longer friends.

The last time I saw you, I praised an ex-Jesuit professor
and you warned me to beware;
too stunned to even respond, I said nothing,
you finally left the table.

A mother’s mania killed you, Garth,
her righteous wrath broadcast against the wrong deadly thug;
the horror of your weeks long death, 
bartering gold to stay alive, believing you would live
forces me back to that bridge and we face-off again
mayhem only in our imaginations.

I confess this is something I wrote long ago, but I've never posted.  So I'm cheating.  What I want to write about is a hetero-sex friendship.  So I will be writing a poem today.

This is it:

we’d seen each other
mostly at a distance, for six years
wandering the dog park with our mutts,
and I always felt this aura
of kindness and an isolation we shared.
I knew she was shy
a rare import these days of shrewd hysteria.

it’s the day of the eclipse
and we came across each other 
in an empty park, and agreed 
to our indifference to the event.

she’d been absent for several weeks
I asked why.

she is moving to Minnesota
to escape Texas heat 
and the crowd of Xtian fascists
in our state govt.

so I told her about the aura
like any awkward lover
(some THC helped)

I could have talked to her
for hours, but knew I must measure my minutes
and did.

The good ones are leaving; 
not many of those auras around.

Salve, Regina