dead yellow friend

keye luke you hibernating
yellow sonafabitch
you better do a lazarus
or make room in the catacomb
I don't even got an anabel lee
here this time
baseball's on strike
saturn's in retrograde

keye luke
you gotta throw me a line
or I'll go down like
peter lorre
all this damn baggage
at my throat

you mentioned perishing once
but I thought you meant the food
we backpacked through a fuck of
a lot of sand, number one son

you'd do those illustrated quadrants
over the campfire, ruining your eyes
deimos is worth less than memory as a moon
or a source of of light and anyway
the martian women are centuries dead now

bet that's why
you died, isn't it you sneak?
getting some dead alien pussy?
foreign sex for foreigners

& me I'm stuck worthless in honkyville
trying to peddle useless maps
of places people don't want to go
not even my friends

This is a very late Keye Luke piece. I believe the baseball strike was in 1993, which explains the tone of the piece, that being the fall that Bradway left me. Long time followers of this series will recall that Keye Luke, the actor who played Jimmy Chan in the Warner Oland/Sidney Toler Charlie Chan movies, and myself went to Mars and mapped its surface over a series of expeditions. As a metaphor, of course. Thus the useless maps refer to poems. The idea that these pieces contain a metaphorical map of actual emotional reality, but it acknowledges that nobody really wants to go to those places. Even today this is mainly true. The actor Keye Luke did die around this time.