While he was dying of everything inside and out,
I caught in dreams at night some kind of scale or bark
that spread across my face and arms
until I looked diseased and knew myself at last
and found no peace in knowledge after all.
My friend, by contrast, I presumed
to love beyond the physical, beyond the dream.
And as he got cadaverous and sore
it made me more devoted than I was
in all the days of his untrammeled vanity.
Easy for me to love while he lost hope,
to dream while he lost faith.
Re-entering that endless and unsteady state
a child is made to suffer, having a body
that won't stay put or known, its visage
ranging and deranging and itself at last,
at 12, tufted with fresh atrocities of hair.
Adults forget, but not for good.
My friend stopped talking, wrote a final poem,
having shit for subject and last word.
He said, he's dead.
He's dead.
One of a hundred people packed on flimsy benches
in a tent agog for antics in a circus animal, I'm bored.
I crave exotic trains of incarnation, things
to swing or sway me, fancy women or a man miraculous.
Instead we get this painful elephant put through his paces
on a red footstool, playing a terrible tuba
or fumbling footman playing the fool, and all around him
hoots and tears swell to wild derision.
And I'll tell you why.
Thanks to a bad road diet and confinement
and his shitty life, the elephant
is defecating now voluminously out his nether end while
wafting all the while in front a coy pink scarf
to win our hearts.
And as he lumbers and revolves saluting everyone,
we see the shit is half the show.
The laughs come out in spatters from the stands.
We can't contain ourselves being ourselves,
already more than we can stand to know.