You Got This,
reads a card from my wife.
Last year she sent it to me.
Keeps me right in line.
Keeps me in focus like Nootropics.
Keeps me in line, like the earth and comets.
Talked to my friend Andrew the other day.
Brought me back to 2004.
Gin and tonics and vomit.
Punk music and Record exchanges.
Days of guitar playing,
cigarette smoking and drinking, a numb feeling.
Medicated and swaying.

I met Andrew in 2000, in a drunken daze,
on the Salem State Campus, the senior dorms.
I had just seen my friend Sean McCabe
and was trying to meet a girl named Candy.
Just so happened Candice wasn’t there,
so that never happened.
It started to rain, and as I walked outside,
I saw Andrew and Richard.
Richard looked like Johnny Rotten
and Andrew I felt like I had already met.
Maybe in another lifetime.
I knew we’d be friends.

Andrew showed me the Damned,
Rolling Stones, and Fevers and Mirrors and The Queers.
He talked to me like there was nothing wrong with me.
We vibed on music and beers,
been friends now going on almost 20 years.

Crazy to think that a choice meeting
might never have happened
if Candy let me in her door
and Sean kept playing beer pong
maybe ten minutes more.

I wouldn’t have met my friend Andrew.
Andrew wrote 7 times for Oddball,
over 100 poems.
Andrew Borne,
this poems for you, dog.
You were my friend when I had none.
You are my friend.
We talk on the phone
whenever we get time to.
Dude, you are true blue
one of my best friends on the planet,
and I love you.

Just a poem, where does the time go?
the mind goes back to 2000,
a pound for my best friend.
Both put smokes down and still down.
Andrew B, Borne, my friend,
to the finish line.

 

Jason Wright is the editor and founder of Oddball Magazine. His column appears weekly. His third book, Train of Thought 2: Almost Home will be available in April 2021.
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