the coins in my pocket
sound like a crackling
bag of nickels
or a movie crowd
getting out of
a comedy with a
loud happy ending
you want to go
back and see again
the very same night
Don
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 both of us 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 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 went in an antiques store and came out and put a small kaleidoscope in my palm. 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 joke or story river stone smooth. He once found an 8 by 10 foot mirror on the street. We both bled when it shattered carrying it up the mar...
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