…you should have been the one to live,

you should have walked tall and taken on the world

with all its prejudiced malice and spite for

we both know you would have made so much more

of the life once glimpsed on both our parts.

I can only offer false machismo, to the point

where I gave that up as bad idea, a notion unbecoming

at the age of seventeen, perhaps the moment

where we said goodbye on the corner, only to dream of each

other’s possible lives, still holding a part of ourselves close,