Dear Gabo,

Dear Gabo,

I think it was at the end of class on a Friday
and we were talking about weird goosebumpy
stuff to kill time seventh graders love the strange
the mysterious the magical so this kid Kyle who’s
normally as quiet as a corpse no offense intended
speaks or rather coughs out so softly like it’s gonna be
the last thing he ever says like we should be taking
notes Sometimes I hallucinate in the woods.

What? What did he say? the other kids ask each other
around the room but not Kyle Is he invisible? A
ghost? Maybe they didn’t hear him or maybe they want
to hear his death rattle one more time but Kyle has
checked out he has left the premises gone to the great
beyond and my head is spinning because I skipped lunch
and the principal comes on the P.A. announces something
about permission slips and having a safe weekend
and then the clock, the friggin’ clock on the wall
clicks 3:15 and within seconds it’s just me and Kyle
staring at each other like we’ve suddenly realized
we’re lost in an eternal forest of solitude.

I’m only letting myself grieve over Gabriel García Márquez in little chunks so that I can stay afloat. Gabo influences my writing more that any other writer and I’m pretty sure he’s sitting on my shoulder now, his wee wing tickling my ear, his soft lips whispering secrets to me as I write.

Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt was as follows:

“…write a “New York School” poem using the recipe found here. The New York School is the name by which a group of poets that all lived in New York in the 1950s and 1960s. The most well-known members are Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch. Their poems are actually very different from one another, but many “New York School” poems display a sort of conversational tone, references to friends and to places in and around New York, humor, inclusion of pop culture, and a sense of the importance of art (visual, poetic, and otherwise). Here’s a fairly representative example.”

Photo from Wikimedia Commons