Let Mums Down

For Craig, April 2021

I was 20 when I found you in the back room at bank street
The bass in your laugh gregarious enough to settle my stomach 
I had never been in a room with people who really did this shit
Just people who talked about it
I was playing a buddy of yours
Which is funny because I now know you were 43
And yet you were probably one of the first people
Who ever treated me like a man
You were big upping me afterwards 
Which was also foreign to me
A spirit that generous
It felt good to be in your presence 

Except later that week 
I stood in that same building
Shaking in front of a music stand
Reading this saccharine dorm room eulogy 
Over this girl who broke my heart or whatever 
I remember leaving my body and waiting for myself to finish
Mumbling this shitty poem into my sneakers
I forget when it was
Maybe a year later?
You told me you remembered that flailing attempt at 
“Performance”
Asking me who was that meek little guy up there
And where the cat from the beginning of the week was 
And why I hadn’t showed up as him
And you said it all with a smile
But I couldn’t help feeling like I let you down

I guess the hardest part of writing to you
Is because I’m always trying to impress you
Ever since the first time you saw 
Mumbling my shitty post-adolescent poetry into a music stand 
And asked me who was that guy up there
And where was Potters? 
Where was he at?
And you were smiling that big toothy smile
But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I 
Let you down

And even now I’m doing 
Everything in my power
To avoid writing this
Lest I do it as the smallest version of myself
And not as whoever it was you saw in me
Like when Nas finally heard the Cole single 
And was like
This ain’t you
I just think
Nothing would piss you off more
Than me being half ass
But it feels like
I got your flowers sitting on my dresser 
Wrapped in a bow I cut from the 
Channel Orange liner notes
And the page I tore out of King’s County 
Where Lemon shouts you out
But I never got around to sending them 
Cause I couldn’t think of what to write 
On the card 

You drew the blueprint 
For this multi-hyphenated lifestyle
How you could rock the mic one night
Saying lines you wrote for yourself (Cause who was gonna write them better?)
And then the next night pop up on my tv
When I least expected you 
You, the glue that held the 
New York cinematic universe together 
And yet one of the most superheroic things about you
Was how you saved so many of us from our own mediocrity 
(Who would have the balls to let you down?)

You knew what it was like
To be failed by your body 
And yet I never saw you show 
An ounce of fear 
I don’t know how not to be afraid 
Which is to say 
Even and especially now 
I still have a lot to learn from you