Niko (Nee-Koh)
        —thinking on Nick Meneakis

I recall your head on the chalkboard,
mouth giving us a sermon on how not

to leave our responsibility in the hands of
our loco sidekick, tragedy. Your hair fell

across your forehead like a willow tree
giving psalms. How jazzy those days,

where light shown on us through huge high
school windows. How calm your anger.

The son you lost. We were bad reps for
what children do to make parents cry for joy.

This music, chronic, and classic, building
and building as you made dots by hitting

the chalkboard with the chalk, keeping the beat,
while the dust fell about like snowflakes.

The hope, your sighs saturate into our craniums.
You pray for dumb luck, that anything can

saturate into the thickness of impenetrable
skulls. You took it until you couldn't take it.

Now, you are stuck in a plastic groove, in
the classroom in my cranium, where shitheads

and dumbasses reside along with
the triggering smell of grandma's lattice

apple pies. You are mugging at my Nana,
whose silver hair is cleanly wrapped in

a bun. Your son is eating a slice of pie,
waving at me to come, to join the rhythmic

tableau of actors in musical for the dead.

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Copyright © 2018 Curtis L. Crisler All rights reserved
from THe GReY aLBuM
Steel Toe Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission