TOM

My dad’s youngest brother worked
construction jobs except for when he didn’t.
Inhaling tar, particulates, layoffs.

“Garage Night” with the boys on Mondays,
inhaling watery beers by the case,
activating my folks’ muscular scorn.

I inhaled their judgment on car rides home,
upper midwestern northern european
passive aggression and shit talking.

At forty-four, I long for a Garage Night.
Less for Milwaukee’s Best than to commune,
wringing what joy one can from finite days.

Half my life ago, brain still underdone,
evangelical, undiagnosed
rejection sensitive dysphoria.

Poor proselytizer, then, preferring 
passive to aggressive, opting instead
to leave people alone.

Unless they were supine, I guess,
inhaling hospitalized air through 
clear medical grade PVC tubing.

None of this duplicity conscious,
boarding the 14 to North Memorial,
Gideon bible in tow.

Concession: none of us knows how to grieve,
to visit those sentenced to perish,
the small talk of final encounters.

Rejection sensitive even then,
no Godtalk breached the transom of my lips,
altar call scrawled instead in the front pages.

I don’t think God is real, nor heaven.
Life is vapor, mysticism on the air.
Tom was fifty when he last inhaled.