Elegy for Jack Williams and the Jack I Was

Years pile as cumulus clouds and the horizon thins under their weight while the
feckless blue space between shrinks.

I see more clearly now my blindness and you, 40 years ago, helped this to happen.

You learned to torture the torturer and endure the time between time when you had no
love because you were not capable of it.

But every while in your once you proved your love was not only possible but true.

The woods of drinking and thinking were our civilized wilderness.

Such a mind so full of natural curiosity and lack of cant, the ability to see reality and
accept it, almost, except for the loneliness, the aloneness, so necessary if you were to
survive.

Two men who only had each other to talk to, this is the way I approached you.

I saw the world as a conundrum, wholly without purpose, me included, and a

wanderer in the wilderness, an ex existentialist as I put it.

Your world was a solution and you dissolved your problem in it. I tried your trick but
for me it would not work.

We both believed in the lessons of history but lived our lives as if ignorant of our
mistakes.

One ups-manship was your god, and you Pottered around with putting everyone down
and I enjoyed and was horrified at your need to do so. I confirmed with you the art of
the pre-emptive strike since no belief but ours was sacred even if scarred.

You wanted and had only women who were mostly mad and mainly beautiful. I
wanted the beauty but could not endure the madness.

We both wanted a mother and whore who would adore us to death and back again.

You had your responsibilities and they were your bete noir that ran you and you ran
from. I watched the war inside of you and saw it was mine too.

Your Rabelaisian wit decorated our world with spittle and spite. I could barely
understand it and furiously could not stand it. But I learned a little courage from you.
You were strong in your sarcasm, armed with your New Yorker Magazine
indifference, Bertrand Russell’s atheism and a boomman’s pike for a penis, you sorted
humans as species of logs, proud of your abilities and keen in avoiding your loss.

I both feared you and made you fear me, although I remained in your debt.
You had two most beautiful daughters that I desired and wanted to protect and your
wife I felt such pity for that I could only look the other way as you tore her to shreds
in front of me and them.

Your son was our final undoing. I saw the Laocoon wrapped around his mind and
reached for no sword to undo him from you. Father and son, bound til death due them
part back to the hole. He left you with his suicide as your Nessus’ Shirt. I smelled
your flesh burning.