for B.

The front yard is littered with American robins
who don’t know they are American robins.

Years ago, I knew the word for this kind of freedom.  
Death was just a concept. I was more gullible than an ear. 

Now, it appears I’ve dropped the keys to all of it 
in the drainage ditch, that the pipe in the painting 

is not, in fact, a pipe in the mind, that the worm 
a robin shuttles across the lawn is just a few scraps

of rubber hose the bird’s brain 
cobbled together into a meal. 

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had this name
stored in the basement below my name, perhaps a morsel

from a past life as a goat, or a blade of grass, the initials 
scratched into a tree so overgrown with canker

no amount of pruning the rotten bark 
would divulge its syllables. 

For B., it was Dr. Gunther. A name he learned 
to forge after paying a friend to drop a cinder block 

on his left hand, an injury planned to grant 
the body a pain that only percocet could stifle. 

Even hampered by a cast, he copied the words 
on the stolen prescription pad so often 

they became a kind of shirt he couldn’t take off, 
wake up Dr. G, as he slumped against the wall of lockers, 

I think you’re on fire Dr. G, as someone shook up
a bottle of mountain dew & sprayed him down. 

In time, it became the shirt they buried him in, 
& by that point it was hard to remember 

what the letter B. actually stood for.   
It was hard to remember the day he carved a door

in his name & flew straight through it.