Donald Dean Kelly died on June 5th. He was my big one. We were twenty six when we met. We walked past each other in the Village late one night and we both turned around. He was wearing a giant parka with a pulled up fur trimmed hood. Gushing beard, big ugly 70s glasses. I only saw the tip of his nose. For me, it was love at first nose. We went to a bar and had beers and I played with the ring pulls on his his pants that zipped down the front. He told me he was a conceptual artist/ live-in babysitter. He once wrote on an egg and mailed it. He slept over and in the morning, I walked him to the subway. He grabbed my arm - "wait a minute." He came out of an antiques store and put a kaleidoscope in my palm. His wordless goodbye. And thus began our many years of promised land and civil war. Most days, he mumbled and stammered but, once in a blue moon, he landed a story, a joke river stone smooth like Carson. He once found an 8 by 10 foot mirror on the street. We bled when it shatte...
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