immortal Beau once body-

checked me, clearing a
corner of what, for a time, be-
longed to the hobbled community
college that dean got in trouble for
stealing from years ago—maybe,
I can’t find the clipping’s remains—but
Beau was bent then braying as much as a punch-
pink Snagglepuss crassly assesses his exits, Hey,
 
you gave me twelve pages of tone! He’d
mimeographed but one gnawed note of the
twelve, and handed them out to our class of
creative writing enthusiasts, as it’d seemed
a creative writing class in name
alone, perchance. He pressed them,
one by one, what’s the story here, junior
woodchuck Inquisitor tickling tur-
pentine, turpitude, nausea, awe, some
glum little lesson in how we just couldn’t write
purely in color and tone and the rain-swoln
runestones rolled and everything music
was honed from. He asked me to meet him
 
for five little, finger-frail minutes (recall,
how the pressure it takes to break a fin-
ger’s still the same dull tug that a car-
rot stick’s split with) to maybe convey
some polished pearls, some scrier’s
silvered sphere his tongue-
tied teachers, maybe, had
sassed and rasped
to a pizzle of beano
or some smashed scrap of
alkaseltzer, midol, tylenol, any-
thing other than what dashed dross his
dreams once seemed to smugly coin-toss. 
Berryman, maybe, he muttered. You’re different but
have you read, now, what was the number of
dream songs—I sure hadn’t, however, 
he then suggested, Snagglepuss 
crassly assessing his exits, Maybe
 
you’re like Maria Callas: lose the weight and
lose the voice. It seemed like he didn’t much care
for opera, albeit charmed he was
by his sporting comparison. Doors
drawn, knobs forgotten, and
hinges arraigned on the 
charge of rust, I scuttled
away, for years still 
straying. But know that Beau 
becomes immortal, regardless,
every time my mind might kick
at a rickety, hiccupping 
board un-
bound 
from 
what black,
tacky, and crackling 
maelstrom shame’s still shouldering,
acned Atlas, slack as a lock-
jawed dog drawn raw from
watching a wobbling pocket-
watch prance and dance and en-
trench like a tick stuck, chipping 
the uncarved block or but tuscan 
marble strictly to cat-scratched 
staffs struck straight as a scowl
or the yowling scars and bedsores
proudly penned in the pain of a
pitiless wisdom, hitherto, unfor-
given, forgettable, echoing, 
beckoning, bitten
off far too
far to ar-
gue with—