My Neighbor, Garvey

poem by Mark Tulin
— www.bewilderingstories.com/issue923/neighbor_garvey.html

A big shoutout to Bewildering Stories for publishing the narrative poem.

Photo by Steven Weeks on Unsplash.com

My Neighbor, Garvey
by Mark Tulin

When Garvey blew his mind,
inhaling a bag of glue,
he stumbled in the driveway
not knowing where he was going.

I spied on him through my back window,
watched the sun glisten off his stoned,
bugged-out eyes.

He was tripping
in a cornucopia of colors,
a purple haze, a Jimi Hendrix guitar riff
of endless chord progressions.

But when he was mellow,
came down from his high,
he played the guitar
like George Harrison,
so sweetly it made you cry.

Garvey went to California in a VW van,
took his Martin acoustic,
a pound of hand-rubbed hash,
but left his girlfriend behind.

Two years later, he came home
but with a new addiction.
He threw needle darts into his arm,
with his drug of choice: heroin.

He made no sense after that.
Said he drank a can of toxic rain,
hung out with a bunch of demons,
tripping on magic mushrooms,
and said the universe
sways back and forth like a lava lamp.

Garvey was my childhood hero,
but he died at thirty-seven,
heroin to methamphetamine,
transcendence to six feet under.

Garvey blew his head off with a shotgun
in Big Sur under the stars,
a free-spirited soul, a hallucinating voyeur,
who just wanted to be happy.