A suicide was performed by a man who
lives in this building by the name of Willie Mays.
And he’d never heard of the real Willie Mays.
So he threw trash at people who called him
The Say Hey Kid.
When we were piled into the car
you pointed and said
“That’s where Willie Mays the mental patient lived,”
and I wondered what if he really was The Say Hey Kid.
And we, the collective, were wrong
to bother an old man in retirement
just trying to sort his trash
as if he were anyone else.
Amy Lawless is the author of Noctis Licentia (Black Maze Books 2008), a four poem pamphlet from Greying Ghost Press, and the forthcoming chapbook Elephants in Mourning ([sic] Detroit). She was awarded a 2011 fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is from Boston but lives in Brooklyn.
*Photo courtesy of bondidwhat.