Dearest Beatrice,

We are witness to an explosion. Call it life call it god, but it’s throwing around trucks and computers, granite buildings and torn shoes. It’s bending trees and eating parrot fish. It’s machine guns and tigers. It’s casting about belly laughs, red hot lava, planets and Mikes. It’s big tornadoes and little hidden lepers drinking coffee. I hear screams and I smell love, and I feel the dirt on my money. But it’s all just passing through. Pipes to nowhere, wires to nothing. Like the Buddha said, “everything is burning” then he went away.

So tell me about faith and hope, say words like afterlife, good and bad, security, and sing other songs of fantasy. Show me a letter from heaven or hell and I’ll show you an ant string across the sidewalk to prove there is a forever. Lie next to me and I will pet your hair as we rocket through time in the love and the tears of the human shift. And I will help you mother with father, I will hold you son and daughter, and I will listen to you brother and sister while the powder in our fuses smoke. And when we step out of it, if we look, maybe we will see the speed it’s really going.

Dear Perry,

Never use fuck in a poem, even if your best friend dies and you know he would like that because he was like that. The word just jumps out at inappropriate times whenever I remember he’s gone. And never let them see you cry when you think of all the fun you had and you know you’ll never do it again. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck this wasn’t supposed to happen. He saw the beauty my eyes missed. Velvet clover Mississippi meadows, dank timeless delta swamps, winters hung up steaming hogs, spread bled pink and shaved. Tiny hidden churches full of musky warm mysterious sweet love characters in their finest Sunday clothes. Thank you for taking me there.

In the predawn stillness of Memphis he heard the distant wailing trains and fully understood it’s not important to understand. Cries that will forever remind me of him always digging deeper behind everything seemingly easy and obvious. God please make Saint Francis right about the eternal life thing. Help me see him in the eyes of others and let that soul stay with me forever.

When I see the majestic kingdom of clouds in the calmness of Coldwater river, through the sites of your black revolver a rusty floating Schlitz can. I’ll hear a longing clarinet from a group of wise cypress knees and your three penny opera harmonica. An ancient gypsy accordion dark in the delta trees, her voice from an earlier universe singing a language I know but don’t understand. A song of unfathomable love, warming the marrow in my arms. Then I will see you looking down from your window over Shinbone Alley and hear your deep gut laughter saying, “go now to old Jaffa and dance for the Jews who knew, like me and psychic mulatto Doc Cherokee, that now never counts on tomorrow.”