for Danny Correa, just an early one in a quarter-century’s-series, unlikely to end this next

On that day did you fly?

(Succeed as you’d done before

to make the stockrooms,

the bag-in-a-box, and the crying

go all away?)

Did you care

or have an inkling,

who had been the cause?

(Alive, I’m not concerned

or needful of revenge.)

I prefer to think that you did

and did

and wouldn’t have,

at least after a few conversations.

And, as we probably discussed over a cigarette and cloves,

regret’s a benefit alone for the living.

I wonder sometimes,

whenever I compose this in my head,

if we all who knew someone,

don’t think of you in flight

and somehow (shamefully) smile.

For a moment again a comic book kid,

as you would’ve been, maybe just one instant.

We, the hundreds

to whom you were known

and the thousands we touch,

miss you and remember.

(The picnic soon to be scheduled,

the pressed shirts at the dry cleaner,

the introduction of our daughters

that should’ve taken place.)

(The words I said to your father

I cannot recall.

Just the spark I remember.

Hugging and smokes stolen and

ash’d in ramekins,

the poetry shared, and song.)

the plushest tears descend

this compact fluorescent cheek

lost ’tween the cushions of loneliness

they float in middle air

responding to a background voice

the head of an untanned girl boomerangs

behind then forward

eaten up by only echoes

among the empty alleys in a dried pasta forest

“Obey me,” and it’s too late she’s done it

no different than she’s done for years

so there’s wreckage

cash drawers overflowing

with just half a pack of Oreos

and candy for the scavenger she’ll be tomorrow

ghostly more than ghastly the entire scene is imagined

the echoes no more than yesterdays behind the tears

they float in middle air

My own old poems

now stage a jailbreak

shouting at me,

“Attica – Attica,”

or, like Andor’s hairless* ape

“One way out!”

Like a gaggle of cops

milling about uselessly

at the slightest hint of incident,

there are just too many of them.

And like those officers

they’re bursting at the seams,

pumped up on andro

and overly aggressive and

dismissive of my right to silence.

As the spores in that one Star Trek episode,

they’ve been shot into my face

and played upon my mind,

diminishing my Spock logic

in favor of emotions long suppressed

and memories of my own Jill Ireland.

* relatively speaking