Desayuno Guapo

One of those top to bottom gray days
Made entirely of rain and no snow
A friend, first met in transit, checks in saying
She's still waiting for summer to end
Another texts that she has sad news and then disappears
Immediately I am thinking suicide - one of the staff or
Possibly, one of the patients - all of their faces running through
My head - it could be any one of us, I can't rule even one out

The river, free of ice, is winding it's way between low banks of wet trees
Seeming still, I want to take it's picture but I keep driving toward my scheduled day
We've been passing acquaintances for many years now, Merrimack and me, it's a
River that has undoubtedly seen too much, and now it sees me stopping for breakfast

It was one of the comedians I watched, clenched the whole time, do his routine more than once
In a bar, he was very brave, I thought, to get up there alone and put himself so far out there
With nothing but a microphone to shield him, walking a tightrope over an audience of hostile
Drunks staring up in mostly uncomprehending silence, waiting for him to deliver something
Maybe one of them is saying to his buddy,  just give him enough rope and he'll...
But that rope didn't hold him, and now his relative is thankful but concerned, wanting to know
How to pull him out of that low, pressed-flat-by-sadness place, he tells her that only up there
On the tightrope is he anywhere close to happy

Maybe he can write his way out, I tell her
He's smart and he writes really good comedy bits
Give him a pen and a notebook and ask him
To write the whole truth.