| Out of Focus
In '69, I met a wild-haired man named Reggie
who walked an empty dog collar on a stiff leash,
who prowled the savage island between adolescence and adulthood,
popping Dexedrine, swilling Ripple, talking baby talk
to the dog collar. "Gude poochie. Poochie poochie hoochie
coo."
Reggie was ill, contracting attention deficit from a whore
years before it became a medical disorder.
The first time I saw his paralyzed smile, we smoked black
hash
laced with white veins of opium. Our feral eyes drifted with
the smoke,
unmoored skiffs in a current of cold light.
I got a hard on when Reggie's girl rubbed her tiny tits
across my arm and asked for the last toke.
I passed the pipe, but Reggie stood there frowning
and sucking air as the water pipe bubbled.
The strange girl giggled "All gone." Reggie’s
right foot
pounded the pavement and he sang along with a
John Lee Hooker 8 track,
"I’m your poochie poochie man. Everybody knows
I am."
His voice squealed like sneakers on a clean gym floor.
When the tape ended, Reggie turned his collar up, petted the
air,
and walked slowly into the night.
He's a chemist now, hired by Bristol Myers
because of his phenomenal pharmaceutical knowledge
and I'm a poet, drunk on words, stumbling over
the illusion of art.
For twenty-eight years we've brushed our wild hair away.
He helped develop Prozac too late to save his own brittle
grin
or my last few healthy brain cells;
but the man still walks an empty dog collar late at night.
He just bought the John Lee Hooker box set on CD.
Some evenings we sit together on a park bench, smoking dope
until the moon changes colors and the dog collar pisses on
my leg.
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