Forty-five years listening to your dark whispers.

Forty years wondering how like you was the friend I cleaved with a sword.

Thirty years seeking a story-threading place.

Twenty years now lost-and-found in driven haste.

Ten years gone since I learned that we shared the dark.

Seven years to break a promise to curate your voice.

Thank you so much, for luring me out after the shadowed truth, away from the devil-rooted dream flower in its venom-lit stalls; thanks so much for chiding a lost boy out into the night, where he might, like a man, fall rather than crawl.

-For the Poet who wrote of himself twice as Rinaldo...I do not even know how those he knew addressed him as family or friend

-James LaFond, Central New Jersey, Tuesday, 6:52 PM, June 29 2021, as the first hot sun of summer falls