11 of 30 Elegy for Eric Deer

Red-faced, unfinished, hand curved to hold the hammer
illegible poems scrawled on notebook-paper
I remember you, clean
reading and building
in a store filled with old paperbacks
not comatose on that lawyer's floor,
veins full of Fentanyl, as they lied over you
your time already finished
Your father, sharer of needles,
fled the scene.

There was a wave behind you,
of dead boys and shrinking funerals
the festival gone out of it, after a while
only the family shows up

but death was still novel then.
and hung over in a five dollar suit
the soles of my shoes cracking
I went in,and spoke to you

You held your daughter's picture in your hand
and the flowers and doilies
of that room were suffocating
as your mother gawked at your exotic friends
and after, We drank and did not sing

We asked your family for your notebooks
the illegible poems and stories,
but they did not understand
how we wanted to hold some piece of you
as you spilled into the ground, and the quiet fell
so they gave us nothing

I found some loose pages, after
in a borrowed book, unfinished drafts
unreadable now, a crooked scrawl against the lines.