forgotten dates

Listening to a new disc of an old date
By Bill Connors titled Of Mist
And Melting with DeJohnette on drums,
Peacock on bass, and Garbarek on saxes.

That sweet boy, a cook at Caruso’s
Down on 4th Avenue, whom I knew
And worked alongside back in the mid
Nineties was one of the first persons

I knew to shoot himself. I can’t recall
His name today. A thin kid and a few
Inches taller than me, I talked to
Him about Hemingway and Steinbeck,

While I waited for him to plate pasta
Dishes for me to deliver to tables. Why
He’s come back to me today, I can’t
Guess. It’s been twenty five years

And I forgot his name, but not his
Thin build, his love of the macho Hem,
And that he drove to Flagstaff, four hours
Away to die parked in the forest.

The record moves on. Bill Connors plucks
His acoustic guitar, which is unusual in
Jazz, most guys go electric, DeJohnette
Does that pulsing drive of his, and Jan

Garbarek blares and flares and wails like lost
Souls in the desolate northern mountains.
Peacock settles like blood into the land.
I used to think it’d be better to be dead too,
But it wasn’t that boy’s suicide that broke the aura.

An army brat, Shay Wills lived throughout the US and Europe. He graduated from the University of Arizona with a BA in English and Creative Writing. A divorced dad of two teens, when he isn’t working at a wellness resort in Tucson, he hikes, does yoga, reads, drinks too much Starbucks, and writes. He has poetry appearing in Bending Genres, The Abstract Elephant, Haiku Journal, Under the Basho, Wingless Dreamer, and The Closed Eye Open. In 2020, he returned to school for a master’s in clinical counseling to help veterans with the array of issues they face.