Scott was late in finding his creative soul.
He took a comic villain role
and made the text sing.
He entered eating a chicken leg.
He tossed the spent bone over his shoulder.
He understood the beat.
He understood the timing.
He knew about down time
and time down.
His cuts were deep and scabbed over,
never truly healed.
The wound was never cleaned and dressed
as it should have been.
We did two shows together.
We weren't finished.
There was so much more that could have been,
would have, should have.
Now he is in the dust and the clouds of billowing ash.
The sky is smudged with him.
He went out into the wild.
He was lost in the asphalt wilderness.
He was living in the diesel exhaust,
cutting the bootlaces
that bound him to the ground.
Though he was barefoot
he could not rise, only fall hard.
His brother is burnt over.
We talked on the phone.
I heard the scorch in his voice
and the ache I know so well,
the raw scald that cannot bear sunlight.
My sorrow for Scott is great.
I smell him in burnt coffee
and fresh paint on plywood.
Green grow the thistles,
in his bare feet, he couldn't walk past them.
The chicken bone hangs in the air
and his pratfall is unrehearsed.