-of Michael Joseph a grade school classmate-

Michael Joseph,

the kid with two first names, who once

forced a younger kid to drink mercurochrome
from its glossy little bottle, telling him:
"it tastes like cherry Kool-Aid",

had a goldfish, languishing

in an old glass goblet, sitting on the mantle

over a fake fireplace in the parlor

of his parents house on the third floor
near the corner of Healy and Quarry.

standing on tiptoes to reach the outer rim,

he’d spit on the surface of the water

amused when the goldfish wiggled up

for a little taste of the stuff.

Michael Joseph was just about the sickest little prick

I’ve ever known and through decades of physical separation,

there hasn't been a moment when my opinion
of him was altered for the better.
–– why Michael crossed my mind on occasion
is better left explained by the big sky objects.
but it might be because somewhere,
assigned to the purgatory section of my brain,
I reasoned that a story of him might one day
be offered to the poem-reading public.
–– well, now he’s dead.

I read his obit in the local papers and was not surprised
at the sparseness of positive accounts in the column.

Michael never married, had no children, no siblings,

no aunts, uncles, not a cousin listed, no pallbearers,–– 

nobody to speak of or at least who’d admit to anything,

let alone show their faces.

christ, even "Sam the Bum" who fell down the library steps
in a drunken stupor had pallbearers.

–– they're telling me Michael worked in the "ironing corridors" of a sweltering

factory outlet store, deep in the bowels of the north-end of town.

––"Men’s dress shirts $2.00, Men’s single breasted suits $25.50".

I've acquiesced to what the thought of Michael Joseph

brings to the table of a poet's intrusiveness.
–– but on the brighter side, the goldfish who suffered daily

under Michael’s foamy islands of spittle, well, I hear tell it's swimming

in clear waters with others of its kind in the suburbs of paradise.