They Killed, Henry, John Berryman, & Me

 

                                        

Fading away on tramadol and ganja takes my pain away, Lord take me to the upper room.

Keep your nose to the grind Henry, breathe easy God says.

John Berryman wrote Dream Songs— here's number 1,

Huffy Henry hid the day,
unappeasable Henry sulked.
I see his point,—a trying to put things over.
It was the thought that they thought
they could do it that made Henry wicked & away.
But he should have come out and talked.

All the world like a woolen lover
once did seem on Henry's side.
Then came a departure.
Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.
I don't see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see, we survived.

What he has now to say is a long
wonder the world can bear & be
once again a sycamore. I was

kicked off the stage by the MC.

I wrote the following poem in 2013. 

They Killed, Henry, John Berryman & Me

John Berryman, high on something, scribbling a poem in the English Department,

remembering 

a  hot, mixed-up, cockeyed day in Chinatown at an opium den, dreaming of wooden ships, the god Neptune and flying fish.  

The Bronksville Hotel Henry is pulverized by cockroaches, mosquitos, and lice magnifying 1000 times in the coterie of his dying brain.

He told the screws to mix his ashes with tobacco and Bougainvillea pedals in a tin of Prince Albert Tobacco, and to place it in the trunk of a Cadillac sedan, because in his words,

there won't be a body this time.

The street people follow the cheerleader to Wicker Zoo where she hands the gorilla a hand-rolled Cuban cigar.

King Kong lights a blunt and blows smoke rings at the sun.

All in all, it was a lovely remembrance somewhere south of Elysian Field.