…except for Jack. Jack
loved boxing gloves and orpines,
and all Jakarta blooms
that died before
he could photograph
their thumbs poking from the dirt
like human thumbs. And
when Jack walked, he stomped
blues onto the pavement.
“Tommy couldn’t
thump or pump a tune
to save his life,” Jack once
told me in
a sentence he wrote
on a receipt and left behind after leaving the diner.