Craig, you’re killing me. You sing
that flavor we all still taste, the way 
you start drinking coffee black to live 
past middle age and there is a nutty
quality, a sweetness not sugar but something
more true, reminding you coffee
comes from a fruit, and you know what’s 
not good for us and evoke those old pick-up-
truck-in-a-field parties as something like Mass,
and pills somehow a transubstantiation. 

But listen Craig, I just can’t do that anymore. 
Neither can you, really, however big
the theater. You grew up with me and thought 
Keith Richards would never die. We knew 
all the jokes. And he looks like death, 
but yet he’s not. My foot bugs me, my blood 
pressure’s too high except where that matters, 
and I make this lament knowing no one 
cares about the pallid discomfort that guys 
like me call suffering. You invoke a god

that’s abandoned everyone but the gamblers 
and so here’s the thing, Craig, 
I have no dice or cards, just the risk
of running the tank too low. But this Sunday,
in the lot before the bargain grocery opens 
and listening to you and the power washer
and the diesel trucks on the highway 
and the ticking of engines cooling 
and the endless natter of other generations, 
your songs remind me how fragile it all is, 
and how even the dumbest yelp
is a paean with the right chords, 
the right snare hit, the right 
lean into a microphone. You sing how
the longer I live the less I know,  
peeling labels off beer bottles 
to see if anything lurks behind them.

Gabriel Welsch writes fiction and poetry, and is the author of four collections of poems, the most recent of which is The Four Horsepersons of a Disappointing Apocalypse. His first collection of short stories, Groundscratchers, was published in October 2021. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his family, and works at Duquesne University.